For two hundred years, the court has planted a seed and watched it fail, and called the failure proof the bloodline is gone. She's grown a hedge of the same flower behind her cottage for three years and never told a soul.
Fennel Brackenfield gathers reed-flowers and marsh herbs for a living, same as her mother before her, and has kept a secret for three years that would get her killed if the wrong person ever saw it: a thriving hedge of the one sacred bloom the whole court has failed to grow in six generations. Everyone knows the Fenrose doesn't grow for anyone anymore. Nobody's ever asked a poor gatherer whether that's actually true.Kellen Ashvane is the Fenwarden, keeper of a ceremonial post that has asked nothing of him in eleven years of service beyond showing up. Then a fen-gatherer wanders too close to the water's edge, and for the first time in his life, the sleeping dragon beneath the fen stirs. What Kellen finds, boundary log by boundary log, once he starts asking why, is that the rite that's supposedly proven the royal bloodline extinct for two centuries has been quietly, deliberately rigged from the very first seed.
Steward Garreth Cravenhall has ruled the interim regency his family built on that rigged rite for three generations, and he genuinely believes every word of the story he was raised to trust. When the proof gets too close to the surface, he doesn't hesitate to bury it, and the woman standing next to it, before the next Greening can prove anything at all.
Perfect for readers who love hidden-heir romance, a slow-burn built on investigation instead of a forced bond, and a dragon who's been waiting two hundred years for exactly one person.
- 🌹 A hidden-heir romance where the mystery, not a marriage contract, is the barrier keeping them apart
🐉 A dragon who's spent two centuries listening for a single true quickening in the ground
🌾 A hidden-power heroine who reads truth and lies in how a living bloom answers a spoken claim
👑 A regency built on a rite rigged so cleanly even the truth-tellers doubted themselves
💍 Standalone romantasy with a full, satisfying HEA
Full-length romantasy (58,000+ words). Standalone love story with a satisfying HEA. Intended for readers 18+.
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Used availability for Sasha Leone's Fenbloom