Edinburgh, 1622. The harvest has failed, the closes are full of the hungry, and someone in the Luckenbooths is selling the last hour of Mairi Thornfield's grandmother.

Mairi can touch a thing and know the hour it last held strong feeling. She has never said so aloud. The last Thornfield woman who spoke what she read was burned for it. But a silver relic sold to a grieving widow carries, to the hour, the afternoon of that burning, and the family amber, stolen twenty-four years ago, is being emptied into fakes.

Simon Lorimer is an Augsburg-trained clockmaker, sunk in debt to the same dealer and paid to make new brass look old. He needs an eye that can tell the difference. She needs a respectable roof in a city that is turning strangers out at the gates. So they promise, before witnesses, to marry at Whitsunday.

It is only a cover. He is lying to her. She has known since the day she touched his tools. And in Scotland, a promise followed by one honest night is a marriage, whether you meant it or not.

Fake betrothal, real marriage. A heroine who reads time, and a hero who forges it.

Book Two of The Thornfield Inheritance