Gabriel McGill came to White Valley to uncover the truth.

Helena Markham knows exactly where it’s buried.

The defiant widow of the town’s former Keeper of Records has spent eighteen months rejecting every rule, boundary, and man who tried to contain her. Now she’s been ordered to share a secure guesthouse with the outsider investigating White Valley’s most closely guarded secrets.

Gabriel intends to remain impartial. Helena intends to make that impossible.

She tests his authority at every turn—but Gabriel doesn’t threaten, bargain, or back down. And the more firmly he holds the line, the harder it becomes for Helena to deny what her body already knows:

She doesn’t need another man’s control.

She needs his.

But White Valley’s history is darker than Gabriel expected, and claiming Helena may force him to choose between exposing the town’s secrets and becoming part of them.

The Chronicler’s Ward is a dark, high-spice romance featuring forced proximity, a defiant widowed heroine, an outsider hero, protective control, domestic discipline, consensual power exchange, secret-society intrigue, emotional surrender, and a stern hero who refuses to let his damaged woman give him no for an answer...