Hysteria

In Victorian London, women don't need to be sick to be diagnosed.
They only need to be owned.

Hulda Crowle is a wealthy man's inconvenient wife-beautiful, barren, bruised... and standing between her husband and the fortune that will become hers on her twenty-fifth birthday.

Orlando Crowle has a solution.

Declare her hysterical. Ruin her reputation. Lock her away.

So he delivers her to Harley Street -
to Dr. Romeo Bowditch, physician, former prizefighter, and the discreet specialist trusted by London's elite to "treat" women behind closed doors... with methods no respectable woman is allowed to speak of.

Hulda expects humiliation.

But Romeo sees the bruises no one else sees.
He reads the fear written into her body.
And the more he touches her - slow, clinical, deliberate - the more the line between treatment and temptation begins to blur.

What begins as therapy becomes obsession.
What begins as medical relief becomes dangerous need.

Soon Hulda is no longer just a wife being managed.

She is a woman awakening to the terrifying, intoxicating truth that she has been caged - and that desire might be the key to breaking free.

When Romeo helps her vanish to a windswept cottage on the coast of Cornwall, Hulda survives on solitude, salt air, and the memory of the only man who ever saw her clearly.

But Romeo has been watched.
Tracked. Threatened.
Forced into a choice that turns Hulda into a ghost.

And when he finally finds her again, their reunion is desperate, starved, and too late.

Because her husband followed him.

Now escape is no longer enough.

Now Hulda must become the kind of woman Victorian England was designed to destroy -

the kind who doesn't just survive...

she retaliates.

HYSTERIA is a dark Victorian gothic romance of obsession, control, and revenge - where medicine becomes intimacy, captivity becomes awakening, and one woman fights to claim both her body and her freedom.

Featuring:

• physician/patient tension

• forbidden medical "treatments"

• forced marriage & coercive control

• obsessive devotion

• escape, isolation, and survival

• revenge against an abusive husband

• corruption, scandal, and asylum horror

• a hard-won HEA