Marginalia and Other Love Languages
A New Adult Romance

About this book:

When meticulous archivist Maeve Sussex arrives at the crumbling Highfield Manor to catalog a legendary literary estate, she expects six weeks of solitary, dusty perfection. Instead, she finds her academic nemesis, Julian Thorne—chaotic, intuitive, and infuriatingly brilliant—already installed at the other end of the mahogany table. Forced into a joint fellowship by a department that refuses to choose between them, they draw a line of blue tape down the center of the library and declare war: Maeve for order and provenance, Julian for the stories hiding in the margins.

But the house has secrets that refuse to stay filed. A cryptic marginal note in a nineteenth-century travelogue points to a locked volume and a key hidden by the shadow of noon. As rain hammers the stained-glass windows and the manor's freezing halls yield one impossible discovery after another—hidden compartments, ciphered letters, a collector's obsessive trail—Maeve's rigid protocols and Julian's wild theories become the only way to decode a mystery that spans centuries. Every find pulls them deeper into the past, and every heated argument across the tape line crackles with a tension that has nothing to do with cataloging standards.

In a gothic mansion where every book holds a confession and every shadow conceals a clue, two rival scholars must decide whether the truth lies in the rigid spine of the archive or the vulnerable scribbles in the margins. *Marginalia and Other Love Languages* is a deliciously atmospheric enemies-to-lovers romance for anyone who has ever fallen for a forbidden margin note, a locked-room mystery, or the one person who reads you better than you read yourself.