Heartbound Chronicles

She crossed a century to end up in his parlor. He hadn't planned on letting anyone in again. Penelope Ward has spent her life leaving before she can be left. Orphaned young and guarding her heart at every turn, the twenty-eight-year-old Midwesterner is shocked when she finally gets a place of her own - a crumbling Victorian house with secrets hiding beneath the floorboards. When she uncovers an antique pendant, she is pulled into another era entirely, and straight into the path of a man who should not exist in her world. Connor Halden has been frozen in sorrow since the death of his wife and child in 1892. Four years later, he is still bound to the house they built and the memories he cannot escape. The last thing he expects is a strange woman and her sharp-tongued calico cat to appear in his front parlor - uninvited, unapologetic, and utterly impossible. Yet her unusual ways, sharp wit, and unguarded compassion awaken something in him he believed was buried forever. Penelope knows that loving Connor could cost her the future she has only just begun to build - and the family, feline and human alike, she has only just found. Connor knows that opening his heart again risks shattering what little remains of it. As the magic tying them together deepens, they must decide whether love is worth the impossible choice - because some bonds aren't meant to survive the ages, unless they are strong enough to change fate itself.