I came to Savannah for a temporary archival contract and a paycheck I couldn’t afford to refuse.
Blackwater House was supposed to be four months of damaged records, donor politics, and old money pretending it cared about preservation. Instead, I found my mother’s buried name in a hidden register, a city built on private arrangements dressed up as protection, and Rowan Mercer—the only man in Savannah dangerous enough to understand what my name meant the moment he saw it.
He should have warned me.
Instead, he moved first.
Now every powerful family tied to Blackwater is circling the same truth: I was never just the archivist. I’m the unfinished line in a ledger they thought had stayed buried, and the more I uncover about my mother’s past, the clearer it becomes that women like us were never meant to leave these houses untouched.
Rowan says he’s trying to protect me.
What he means is that he claimed me before anyone else could.
And the worst part is that I know exactly what kind of man he is—controlled, ruthless, raised inside the same machinery that tried to turn my mother into paperwork—and I want him anyway.
But wanting him is one disaster.
Trusting him could become the rest of my life.
Mercer’s Claim is a dark southern gothic romance with an obsessive anti-hero, old-money family secrets, forced proximity, dangerous protection, and a heroine who refuses to be filed quietly into anyone else’s story
Genre: New Adult Romance
Blackwater House was supposed to be four months of damaged records, donor politics, and old money pretending it cared about preservation. Instead, I found my mother’s buried name in a hidden register, a city built on private arrangements dressed up as protection, and Rowan Mercer—the only man in Savannah dangerous enough to understand what my name meant the moment he saw it.
He should have warned me.
Instead, he moved first.
Now every powerful family tied to Blackwater is circling the same truth: I was never just the archivist. I’m the unfinished line in a ledger they thought had stayed buried, and the more I uncover about my mother’s past, the clearer it becomes that women like us were never meant to leave these houses untouched.
Rowan says he’s trying to protect me.
What he means is that he claimed me before anyone else could.
And the worst part is that I know exactly what kind of man he is—controlled, ruthless, raised inside the same machinery that tried to turn my mother into paperwork—and I want him anyway.
But wanting him is one disaster.
Trusting him could become the rest of my life.
Mercer’s Claim is a dark southern gothic romance with an obsessive anti-hero, old-money family secrets, forced proximity, dangerous protection, and a heroine who refuses to be filed quietly into anyone else’s story
Genre: New Adult Romance
Used availability for Christin Wales's Mercer's Claim