The Cartographer's Rivalry
An LGBTQ+ Historical Romance

About this book:

On the fog-choked cliffs of Penobscot Bay, the Vance Atlas Collection awaits a master's touch—and two masters have arrived. Julian Ashcroft, a meticulous conservator who treats vellum like a living thing, needs the commission to save his Boston workshop. Samuel Sterling, his charismatic, silver-tongued rival, needs it to cement his gilded reputation. Locked together in a glass-walled conservatory at Blackwood Manor, they have three weeks to prove their worth on salt-damaged sixteenth-century sea charts, judged by a cynical lawyer and the ghost of a timber baron who believed the maps held a navigational secret worth killing for.

The air between them crackles with eight years of betrayal, stolen credit, and the memory of a neck-cloth pressed to a bleeding finger in a Philadelphia basement. Julian's slow, reverent chemistry wars with Sterling's brilliant, risky alchemy; every decision on humidified parchment is a duel, every shared glance a skirmish. But as the autumn gales hammer the granite and the manuscripts begin to yield their hidden latitudes—coastlines that don't exist on any modern chart, a deep-water trench through the Penobscot shoals—their professional hatred ignites into something far more dangerous. The maps aren't the only things coming undone in the salt-scented light.

*The Cartographer's Rivalry* is a lush, atmospheric historical romance where enemies become reluctant partners, then something neither can name. For readers who crave intellectual foreplay, gothic Maine scenery, and a love story written in iron-gall ink and gold leaf—where the sharpest instrument in the lab is the human heart.