Not a Hand to Steady Her
Nell Kersey finds a book that was never on the inventory: black leather, no title, her mother's name inked into a page three hundred years old.
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The story
The story
Nell Kersey finds a book that was never on the inventory: black leather, no title, her mother's name inked into a page three hundred years old. Nobody in her family mentioned that her mother studied here, on a Scottish sea cliff, or the secret society that kept her.
Alasdair Dunbar wants the book back. What he offers instead is a year as his candidate: trials that have hurt people before her, and himself as her sponsor, bound by a rule three hundred years old. A master never touches his candidate. Not a hand to steady her. Not a coat for her shoulders. He says it like a warning. She hears it like a dare, and signs the roll.
Somewhere under six hundred years of stone, a girl who came for her mother's name has promised a year of herself to a man forbidden to touch her, and wanting to more than he has wanted anything.
A steamy dark academia romance about a secret society, a rule built to break them, and the year it takes him to lose that fight.
Spice map
Where it gets hot
Heat, chapter by chapter. No spoilers, just warning.
The world
Know your way around
Character
- Alasdair Dunbar
- The dark-coated stranger who walks into the archive at closing time and tells her to put the book down. Twenty-seven, and used to rooms rearranging themselves around him.
- Moira Kersey
- Nell's mother, who died when Nell was ten and never once mentioned the university she attended at eighteen. Her name is the third line on the oldest page Nell can find, dated 1994, with a small bent key marked beside it that nobody will explain.
- Morag
- Keeper of the archive reading room, who locks every door herself and confiscates contraband pens with the gentle finality of a customs officer.
- Nell (Helen) Kersey
- An American archives scholar, twenty-four, six weeks into cataloguing a dead professor's bequest at an ancient university on the Scottish coast when she finds a book that was never on her inventory, with her dead mother's name written inside it.
- Professor Hector Wemyss
- A moral philosophy professor, forty years at the university and dead before the book opens. Nell has spent six weeks sorting his correspondence and grown fond of him through his receipts. The book she was not supposed to have was hiding at the bottom of his last box.
Term
- Sponsor's mark
- Small symbols inked beside certain names in the register, marking who vouched for whom down the centuries: a wheel with nine spokes, a crook, and a key drawn with a bend in its stem, which is the mark beside Moira Kersey's name.
Place
- St. Coren's
- An ancient university on a sea cliff on the Scottish coast, six hundred years old, with an undercroft archive, a student handbook, and at least one society three centuries older than anything the handbook admits to.
Object
- The register
- A small black book, its cover tooled with a border of nine braided lines, that Nell finds misfiled at the bottom of Professor Wemyss's last box. No title, no provenance note, and a page near the back with her mother's name on it.
Spoiler-safe. Only what you learn in chapter 1.
