The Lady Automaton Maker
A Regency Romance

About this book:

In the gaslit shadows of Regency London, Miss Clara Pennington commits treason with every turn of her file. By day, she repairs chronometers for the ton; by night, she builds forbidden automata—clockwork birds that sing, mechanisms that think—in defiance of the Crown's Edict of 1804. Her illicit craft is the only thing keeping her workshop from ruin, until the Duke of Blackwood kicks open her back door with a proposition as dangerous as her trade: five hundred sovereigns to build a machine that borders on the living, from a blueprint that could see them both hanged.

Julian Blackwood doesn't want a toy for the drawing room—he needs a miracle of engineering to save his estate, and he's certain the brilliant, sharp-tongued woman hiding behind her father's name is the only mind in England capable of it. But Clara has spent years surviving by invisibility, and the duke's incendiary gaze threatens to expose more than her illegal workshop. As they wrestle with gears, governors, and the Guild's tightening noose, intellectual sparring ignites into something far more volatile. In a world where a woman's genius is a crime and a duke's secrets are lethal, building the impossible might be the easiest part of their bargain.

From the cobblestones of Soho to the ballrooms of the ton, *The Lady Automaton Maker* winds a clockwork romance where forbidden science meets forbidden desire. For readers who crave brilliant heroines, brooding heroes who respect the mind before the heart, and a love story built gear by precise gear—this is Regency romance engineered for the steampunk soul.