The Widow He Loved

Major Nathaniel Croft came home from Waterloo with a limp, an unexpected title, and orders to settle the affairs of a dead colonel. He expected a helpless widow. He found Frances Ellingham already running the farm, already past the worst of her grief, and entirely capable of telling him to leave. He does not leave. Through one long summer of harvest, boundary disputes and a barn fire that was probably not an accident, Nathaniel and Frances build something neither of them has words for. He is a soldier without a war; she is a widow who has decided, firmly, that she will not marry again. When he sells the last thing he owns to save her farm and asks for nothing in return, she asks only for time. A quiet, deeply felt Regency romance about two people who have already lost enough to recognise what they have.