In the match factories of London's East End, white phosphorus rots the jaws of the girls who dip the matches. The owners know. They count their profits and look away.
Louisa Selwood dips anyway. It's the factory or the streets, the factory or the moneylender who holds her dead father's debt and means to collect it in flesh. Her father died branded a swindler, and his shame is all he left her.
Then Elias Branwell, the works' cold and ruthless master, offers her a bargain no desperate woman could refuse. Marry him. Play his respectable wife until his merger is signed, and her debt is wiped clean. It will not be a true marriage. The day the ink dries, he means to set her aside and send her away, and he tells her so to her face.
Louisa takes the bargain with her eyes open. What she doesn't expect is the slow, unwilling pull toward a man as cold and as scarred as she is. What neither of them expects is the secret buried under her father's disgrace, or the death of a young factory girl that will drag them both into open court.
Because Branwell has his own reckoning coming. And when it comes down to the respectable life he's clawed thirty years to win, or a truth that will burn it to the ground, only one thing is certain: someone has to strike the match.
The Matchgirl's Bargain by Sophie Winsor is a clean, brooding Victorian romance of bargained hearts, buried truths, and the terrible price of respectability. Perfect for those who love enemies-to-lovers and marriage-of-convenience stories with redemption at their core.
Genre: Historical Romance
Louisa Selwood dips anyway. It's the factory or the streets, the factory or the moneylender who holds her dead father's debt and means to collect it in flesh. Her father died branded a swindler, and his shame is all he left her.
Then Elias Branwell, the works' cold and ruthless master, offers her a bargain no desperate woman could refuse. Marry him. Play his respectable wife until his merger is signed, and her debt is wiped clean. It will not be a true marriage. The day the ink dries, he means to set her aside and send her away, and he tells her so to her face.
Louisa takes the bargain with her eyes open. What she doesn't expect is the slow, unwilling pull toward a man as cold and as scarred as she is. What neither of them expects is the secret buried under her father's disgrace, or the death of a young factory girl that will drag them both into open court.
Because Branwell has his own reckoning coming. And when it comes down to the respectable life he's clawed thirty years to win, or a truth that will burn it to the ground, only one thing is certain: someone has to strike the match.
The Matchgirl's Bargain by Sophie Winsor is a clean, brooding Victorian romance of bargained hearts, buried truths, and the terrible price of respectability. Perfect for those who love enemies-to-lovers and marriage-of-convenience stories with redemption at their core.
Genre: Historical Romance
Used availability for Sophie Winsor's The Matchgirl's Bargain