Miss Eliza Takes The Reins

Eliza Bell can face down a requisition officer, deliver a foal at three in the morning, and run an estate stripped bare by war without once raising her voice. She cannot, for the life of her, tell a man how she feels. When her father leaves for Belgium, Eliza is left in charge of Belle Haven, the family's cavalry horse-breeding estate. The army has taken almost everything. What remains is a handful of pregnant broodmares, a breeding programme with no stallions, and a responsibility that would crush most adults, let alone an eighteen-year-old girl. Then a wounded lieutenant walks through the gate with a blind stallion and nowhere else to go. David Llewellyn is quiet, capable, and completely unsuitable — a Welsh farmer's son with no money, a bad arm, and the stubborn conviction that the horse who saved his life deserves to come home. He does not ask permission to stay. He simply stays, and the staying undoes her. Because Eliza was abandoned on a church doorstep as an infant, and the lesson written into her bones before she could speak is this: everyone leaves. Needing someone is how you get hurt. And the walls she has spent eighteen years building are no match for a man who listens with his whole body and never once tries to take what isn't offered. The mares won't stop foaling. The army won't stop taking. And the man she's falling for is one set of orders away from walking out of her life.