THE INK AND THE ROSE

The Ink and the Rose

She is the magistrate's daughter. He is the man trying to prove her father corrupt. Neither of them planned to fall in love across the courtroom.

Sophia Alderton has spent her whole life as the dutiful daughter of Portsmouth's most respected magistrate, sensible, composed, and quietly certain that good and interesting were never going to be the same thing for a woman in her position.

Leo Halloway runs a small newspaper out of rooms above a chandler's shop, and he has spent two years chasing a story about dockyard fraud that keeps leading, inconveniently, back toward Sir Edmund Alderton's courtroom.

Neither of them expected the lending library on Tuesday mornings to become the one place where they could simply talk, not as adversaries, not as a magistrate's daughter and a radical editor, but as two people who had each spent too long managing everything and everyone around them.

But Leo's investigation is closing in on the truth, and Sophia's name is about to appear in a legal filing because of it. She must decide what she owes her father, what she owes the truth, and what she owes the man who has never once asked her to choose between them, only to be honest about which one she already has.

Some sentences don't need to be good. They only need to be true.

A witty, warm, slow-burn Regency romance from Scarlet Somerset's Scandals series, for readers who love a heroine with a spine, a hero who fights fair, and a love story that earns every quiet moment it takes.