The Perilous In-Between

A dark secret. A town in peril. A handsome stranger.

Between protecting her town from a vicious sea monster and keeping her overbearing mother off her back, Victoria has enough to deal with. She doesn't need the bewitching charm of dapper lords wooing and tricking her into marriage.

When a mysterious man shows up in Chuzzlewit, he throws her completely off course. Victoria experiences things with Graham she didn't know she could feel. His mesmerizing candor and brazen abandon make her crave him in ways she never anticipated.

But Graham isn't all he appears to be. He knows secrets about people, things he couldn't possibly know, including a secret about Victoria herself that she has yet to uncover.

And when he tells her what that is, being forced into wedlock is no longer her biggest problem.

Getting out of her town is.

Fans of The Paper Magician by Charlie Holmberg and The Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare won't want to miss this dazzling romp in a steampunk, fantastical Victorian world.

Chapter One

Of all the times for Lord Merek to visit, he had to come when Victoria wasn’t properly dressed.

She had sloughed out of her corset and skirts in place of a pair of trousers and one of her late father’s shirts, which was tucked in and had the sleeves rolled to her elbows. If Mama could see her now, she would pitch an entire tea tray across the room.

Victoria smirked at the thought. That made this act of rebellion all the more appetizing.

She’d slipped away to the shed behind her manor house. Mr. Tolbert often allowed her to tinker with things here where she couldn’t anywhere else. She’d tried fiddling with her plane, Elsie, last week, and not only had she been caught, she’d gotten several demerits for doing so.

“You’re a pilot,” Uncle Jarvis had said. “Not a mechanic.”

He was under the delusion that working with the machines she operated in any other capacity than to make them fly was somehow beneath her. Or that she wasn’t as qualified as the men who fixed the planes at the Aviatory. She wasn’t sure which.

So she secluded herself in the gardener’s shed every chance she could. This visit home hadn’t been publicized. She’d been certain no one knew of her exploits—so how was it that Lord Charles Merek was making his way across the back lawns right in her direction?

She had no mirror with which to check her appearance. There really was nowhere that she could hide, either. Chances were, he’d already seen her through the greenhouse windows.

“Should have them blackened,” she muttered to herself, wiping the grease from her hands with a cloth.

Lord Merek’s knock sounded. She bolted to her feet and swore under breath. She could ignore the knock, she supposed, but he had it in his head that the two of them were to marry, and a man as titled and handsome as Charles wouldn’t take snubbing for an answer.

Victoria paused. Forget the cloth.

“He wants to marry me?” she said to herself, straightening and hiking her sleeves higher up her arms.

She fluffed her hair away from her neck and set her shoulders.

“Then he needs to know exactly what he’s getting himself into.”

Why should she try to hide who she was? She was a pilot. She also had a fascination with how things worked, and that wasn’t something he could wish away.

“Victoria?” Charles called through the door. “Miss Digby? Are you in there?”

With the hopes that seeing her in her true colors might scare him away, Victoria rubbed a smear of grease on her cheek for good measure, and, ready for battle, she opened the door.

Charles was dressed immaculately in a tailored suit coat, patterned waistcoat, and a cravat that was tied to such perfection Victoria felt she should congratulate his valet on the intense detail he paid to each and every crease.

His face was the true work of art, however; Charles was a chiseled masterpiece of the male species. His eyes were symmetrical almonds. His cheekbones were the exact angle necessary to draw attention to his slate jaw and the idyllic shape of his lips.

He was too perfect. Far, far too perfect.

Victoria loved to fix things. How could she be with someone who wasn’t in need of any improvements?

Anything that had this immaculate of an outer shell often hid a decayed interior, and she had no interest in being the one to unearth whatever dirty secrets he hid beneath his seemly veneer.

“Miss Digby,” he said, bowing and then straightening with imperial etiquette.

He squinted at the angle of the sun in his eyes, which probably accounted for the reason he hadn’t yet noticed her abysmal attire and state.

“Good afternoon,” she said, none too friendly. “What are you doing here?”

“I went to find you at the Aviatory but was told you’d taken the afternoon off.”

“I have.”

He cleared his throat. Pulled at his cravat.

Too tight, Lord Merek?

“I suspected you would come home. Your mother told me you were speaking with the gardener and sent me in this direction. It seems I’ve interrupted something.”

There it was. The disapproval she’d been waiting—hoping—to find in his eyes as they swept down her form and took in the overlarge man’s shirt, the trousers inappropriately showing the shape of her legs, and the scuffed boots she wore during protocol training.

Why should he be so surprised to find her in trousers? She wore battle leathers during her nightly patrols, and those left nothing to the imagination.