Genre: Historical Romance Heat Level: 2 Word Count: 53, 500 ISBN: 978-0-3695-1556-8 Editor: Laurie White Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

A Quiet Fire in May by Eleanor Whitlock

Heat Level 2
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In a village divided by hunger, loyalty, and fear, Clara Ashford refuses to choose who deserves to be saved. As a miners’ strike tightens its grip on Westerton Vale, her church hall becomes a fragile refuge—and a battleground.

But when a sharp-minded outsider steps into the heart of the unrest, Clara finds herself drawn into a struggle where compassion is political, neutrality is impossible, and every choice has a cost.

Rich with tension, longing, and quiet defiance, this is a sweeping story of courage, community, and love under pressure.

 

Excerpt:

He crossed to the table and placed several folded sheets before her—blank, worn at the edges from handling. “I thought you’d prefer to do this yourself.”

Clara took them, the brief brush of his fingers registering before she could prevent it. She unfolded one sheet and reached automatically for her pencil.

“Zones,” she said.

She did not ask him to stay.

He did not ask permission.

They moved into the work as though it had already been agreed.

The map formed quickly beneath her hand—roads, buildings, the river bend, the footbridge marked too narrow to trust. Ethan added where necessary, economical and precise. He did not overwrite her work. He supplemented it.

“You missed this rise,” he said quietly, indicating a dip along the tramway path.

She glanced at him, aware suddenly of proximity—not imposed, but present. “Yes,” she said. “We didn’t check it thoroughly.”

“We will.”

They continued, the page filling, the plan taking shape in lines and marks that meant more than either of them said aloud. Mabel rose at some point, taking instruction without question, her role fitting cleanly into the structure they built.

Both reached for the same edge of the paper and stopped. It was a small thing, made sharper only by the fact that neither corrected it at once.

Their hands halted—close enough to register, not close enough to touch. It should have been nothing. A simple misjudgment of distance. The kind of thing corrected at once. Instead, neither of them moved quickly enough.

Ethan’s gaze dropped.

The pause was brief enough to miss and long enough to alter the air between them.

Mabel’s voice—distant, practical, real.

Clara pulled back first. Not abruptly, not carelessly, but with controlled precision, as though the movement had always been intended. Her hand returned to the pencil; her posture reassembled itself around purpose.

Ethan straightened at the same moment.

“That can’t happen again,” he said. The words were aimed at the map, but not with enough conviction to hide what they were avoiding.

Clara’s grip tightened on the pencil. “No,” she said. “Not because I can’t manage it. Because Elsie deserves better than our distraction.”

He stilled.

There was the smallest shift in him, a recalibration, as though he had expected agreement and found something else instead.

Clara drew a line across the map, steadying it as she spoke, anchoring the moment into something they could both stand inside. “Not because I can’t manage it,” she said. Then, after the smallest pause, more quietly: “Though I may be less certain of that than I sounded. But Elsie deserves better than our distraction.”

Ethan’s jaw tightened, just slightly—not in disagreement, but in recognition. “Understood,” he said.

But the word carried more than agreement. It carried awareness—of himself, of her, and of the fact that what had just passed between them had not been imagined. He held her gaze a beat too long before seeming to realize it, and when he looked back to the map the movement was controlled enough to matter.

Clara became aware then of the cold still clinging to his coat and the measured rhythm of his breathing. It unsettled her because it matched her own.

It would have been easy to mistake it for ease.

It wasn’t.

It was discipline.

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