The Kinsale Chronicles

Mr. Edmund Doyle, Fellow of the Linnaean Society, arrives in Kinsale in the spring of 1813 with a leather trunk, a great many confident opinions, and a commission from the Royal Society: to document the rare limestone flora of the Burren, and to give due credit to the Society's most brilliant Irish correspondent—a Mr. E. M. Connell.

There is only one difficulty. E. M. Connell is not a Mr.anything.

She is Mrs. Rosaleen Connelly: widowed, formidable, and quietly the finest field botanist in Ireland — a woman who has spent a decade letting her work speak under a borrowed name, because the gentlemen of London would never have read it under her own. She has little use for a Royal Society man come to put the correct labels on what she already understands better than he does.

What neither of them anticipates is how well they argue. Or how, across a summer of limestone pavements, flooded meadows, and a monograph that grows more remarkable by the week, exasperation turns to respect — and respect to something with no convenient name and no tidy ending. For his life is in London, and hers is rooted in Kinsale as deeply as the rare orchids she guards, and neither is a thing easily moved.

A witty, slow-burn Regency romance for readers who like their heroes humbled and their heroines already right. Book One of The Kinsale Chronicles.