The Black Cat's Key

She has survived a hundred years by belonging to no one. Then a gentle Highland baker set a fish pie on the floor and never once reached for her.

Elsbeth is a cait sìth - a fairy cat who wears a woman's shape and a small brass key that is the one thing in the world with the power to undo her. For a hundred years she has stayed alive by a single unbroken rule: never warm yourself at a hearth you aren't ready to walk away from. But she has let herself linger a whole season in Hearthglen, a fog-wrapped fishing village at the edge of the sea, drawn back night after night to the warmth of the Pint & Pie and the soft-spoken baker Fergus - the one soul who feeds her without ever trying to keep her. Then, one reckless, drink-loosened evening, cornered by suitors who will not take no, she throws down a challenge she is certain will leave her in peace at last: take the key off her cat, and she'll wed the man who manages it. By morning the whole glen is hunting the black cat with nets and cages, and Elsbeth has pointed forty grasping hands straight at the one thing that can end her.

The old rule says run - when an eye stops on your secret, you are gone by nightfall. But Hearthglen is the first place in a hundred years that has begun to feel like home, and Elsbeth cannot make herself leave it. She has help she never asked for: Fergus, who would sooner cut off his own hand than close it round her key; Rhona, the sharp wee girl who looked straight through her and decided, at eleven, to keep the secret; and fierce old Mòrag Beaton and the ancient library-keeper Mrs. Dunbar, who know exactly what she is and set the cream out anyway. And then a cold, courteous stranger steps off the coast road - a man who knows precisely what a brass key on a black cat is for, and means to take her by right.

The harvest festival is winding down, the stranger is closing in, and Elsbeth is out of moves. To flee is to lose the only home she has ever let herself want; to stay is to be caught. Can a creature who has spent a hundred years running finally let herself be chosen - freely, and let stay - before she is taken for good?

A cozy Highland folklore romance with a slow-burn, cinnamon-roll hero, a shapeshifting cat you'll adore, and a whole village of women keeping one another's secrets. Clean and wholesome - warmth, wonder, and not a drop of gore. A standalone prequel to the Hearthglen Cat Mysteries; read it before Book One or after.

In Hearthglen, the tea is strong, the cats are not entirely cats, and nobody stays a stranger for very long.