An elegant, slow-burn time travel romance. Rosalind’s story begins in Victorian England in 1895, where she is a duchess of fifty, and unfolds in the present day, from the year 2026 onward.
England, 1895. At fifty years old, Rosalind Carrick, Duchess of Aldworth, has spent her whole life being handed from one man to the next. Married off at seventeen, exiled for thirty years, and now, newly widowed, shipped across the Atlantic to a second husband she has never met, she has learned the only safety a woman in her position is allowed: to want nothing, and so to have nothing left to lose.
Eight days before the wedding, with a storm coming on, she walks into the trees behind her intended’s house and keeps walking.
Lightning takes her. She wakes in the same woods, in the year 2026.
A hundred and thirty years from everything she knew, Rosalind is no one. No title, no husband, no country she recognizes, and no way home. But for the first time in fifty years, she is also no one’s possession. Taken in by a bookshop owner who asks no questions, befriended by the women of a local shelter, and accompanied by the one creature that fell through time beside her, she begins to build something that has never once been hers: a life of her own making, in a strange and dazzling new century.
Then she meets Julian. A quiet, unhurried man who drives three hours just to sit in her shop. A man who would give her the whole world, and ask for only one thing in return.
The truth.
The one thing she can never tell him.
The Duchess and the Billionaire is Book One of The Thornwood Duology, a luminous time travel romance about grief, reinvention, and the courage it takes to be fully known. Rosalind’s story begins here and concludes in Book Two.
Perfect for readers who love a time slip romance with a strong, older heroine and a slow, tender second chance romance over fifty. If you enjoy a fish out of water Victorian woman finding her feet in the modern world, a widow with a secret past, small town bookshop charm and found family, and an uplifting, emotional story of reinvention, Rosalind’s second life is waiting for you.
✔️ Mature Heroine (50) ✔️ Time Slip Romance ✔️ Victorian Duchess ✔️ Fish Out of Water ✔️ Slow Burn Romance ✔️ Billionaire Hero ✔️ Small Town Bookshop ✔️ Found Family ✔️ Crow Companion ✔️ Herbalist Heroine ✔️ Widow with a Secret Past ✔️ Second Chance at Life ✔️ Reinvention After Fifty ✔️ Maternal Grief ✔️ Low Heat / Closed Door ✔️ Hopeful Ending ✔️ Series HEA (resolves in Book Two)
