THE KEEPER OF DUNMORE

Ewan Dunmore came home from the Battle of Killiecrankie with eighteen names he couldn’t put down and one name he didn’t know what to do with — the man who sold his position to the Crown was already dead. The widow was living in his keep.

She has a legal document that says she can stay.

Before he can find a way around the document, there’s a six-year-old who asks him about the tattoo on his forearm and whether he can teach her to identify birds by their calls and he says yes before he decides to, a well drainage problem she fixes without mentioning it, a crumbling eastern wing she corrects his repair plan for without apologising for being right, and a dinner at which her daughter announces to the full table that the Dunmore man is her favourite person in the keep before either adult can prevent it.

Catriona Bellshaw has been smaller than she is for eight years. She got very good at it. She is, in the specific conditions of this crumbling Highland keep with no money and a political situation that could end everything they’re building, discovering that she has stopped doing it in his presence without noticing when it happened. This is the most terrifying thing that has occurred since she arrived.

Then Ewan finds the letter. The one in her dead husband’s handwriting. The one that names his position, his men, the exact location of the ambush before Killiecrankie, and the amount Edmund Bellshaw was paid to provide it.

She doesn’t know. He has forty-eight hours to respond to a Crown offer that would solve the clan’s problems, secure the land, and require her departure in thirty days. He has a letter that tells him eighteen men are dead because of the woman sleeping in his east guest chamber. He has a growing inability to pretend that the woman he was prepared to hate and the woman in his keep are the same person.

She spent eight years in a marriage that required her to be smaller than she was. He has been carrying an anger with nowhere to go since July.

Highland romance at its most charged — set in the Scottish winter of 1689, where honesty turns out to be harder, and better, than either of them planned.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance–Historical Romance–Scottish–Highlanders sits at 5.8 sales-to-comp (Hot Niche) with only 3,136 competing titles — small enough to reach the top 20 at achievable sales volumes

→ Literature & Fiction–Historical Fiction–Scottish is the fastest-growing sub-market in all of Historical Fiction — +54% 12-month sales rank improvement; new reader demand is entering faster than new supply; this is the optimal entry window

→ The betrayal-letter premise is a structural differentiator — the moral weight of a widow who doesn’t know what her husband did elevates this above category standard and generates the “I couldn’t stop thinking about it” reviews that drive word-of-mouth

→ Dual POV first person — the dominant format in the Highland romance top 20; gives readers what they specifically seek: both internal experiences, both sets of assumptions dismantled simultaneously

→ Nessa is the series’ readthrough engine — the six-year-old in Book 1 becomes the protagonist of Book 3 (The Bride of Glendunach); readers who fall in love with her are pre-sold on her adult story before it exists

→ The Dunmore Legacy series architecture — four books across sixty years of Highland history; strong also-bought chain that compounds across the series from a market showing +54% growth

TROPES:
• Forced proximity
• Enemies to lovers (with actual reasons)
• Reluctant protector
• Widow finding herself
• The keep as contested ground
• Slow burn that earns every degree
• He fixes things with his hands; she fixes things with her mind
• A child who sees everything and announces it at dinner
• The letter that changes everything
• The departure that is actually a question
• He comes after her
• Dual POV
• Series setup

HEAT LEVEL: Steamy 

Perfect for fans of: Diana Gabaldon, Julia London, Hannah Howell, and Karen Marie Moning