With the Medieval English setting and a little touch of political intrigue, the story was quick pasted and kept me guessing until the last moment.

The progression of their relationship was incredibly believable and the author really did a great job on selling their romance and chemistry. When Raff finds a disheveled man in Hartswood forest, the last person he expects it to be is his sister's betrothed who is attempting to escape his father's control. The pace of the book was slow at times, but this just made me want more of it - I could feel the tension burning through the words. I was unsure if Penn’s insecurities were only because he was queer (and if that was the main reason his father hated him). The POV switches between Raf and Penn quite quickly, sometimes in separate sections and sometimes in separate sentences.Raff's younger sister is betrothed to Penn - his birth name being William, he prefers to go by Penn - yet they have never met and they don't know what the other looks like. Penn meets Raff once he decides to skip out on his arranged marriage and get out from under the thumb of his abusive father. It has been a long time since I’ve read a historical fiction and this is my first queer historical fiction however, after this story, I’ll be adding this niche genre to my top three.

Penn and Raff are just so soft and adorable with each other, I genuinely was kicking and screaming for 75% of this book. It was clear that they had a great relationship with their brother and they played an integral part in the story, as did Penn’s sister Jo. A few things about this struck me as odd, so I checked with a friend who's a farmer and has long experience of both dogs and horses, and of dogs and horses living together. Aldi's comment here points out that we're in 1360 and there's not an inkling that the Black Death ever happened, though it "decimated London in 1349 and reached Scandinavia and northern England by 1350," eventually killing 25 million people, a third of the population of Europe (Kathryn A. The side characters were great and I would actually have loved to have a bit more time with some of them, particularly Raff’s sister Lily.

Their stolen moments of tenderness were touching, but I did fall a little out of love with their romance by the end of the story.

The plot is really addictive - even though you *think* you know what might happen, there are so many twists and turns that'll leave your heart in your mouth. Look, I'm not making an itemized list of everything wrong with that sentence, because I have a lot to get to in this review, so I'll just point out that "it" has no antecedent and that the final clause is a grammatical mess. What I am happy about is definitely that a mainstream romance publisher is making a choice in favour of a soft gay historical to break up the line up of safer titles.This is a wonderfully tropey historical fiction with a world that feels rich and fully realized and a secret-identities twist that's both fun and impossible to look away from. It would have been nice to have a deeper sense of place and time, but in a romance, granted, but it is faithful to the tropes promised by the package. The romance developed slowly because Raff was hesitant to do anything with Penn because of the power imbalance. It was enjoyable to read Penn coming out of shell and finding his own talents and realizing he did not deserve his father's abuse.

despite the constant feeling I had that the setting was fairly arbitrary and it really could have been any pre-industrial time period. I adored everything about this book, the travel companion trope, the slow burn, the humour- it was perfect! I kind of think there was no hope for me with this one, partially because I hate when characters run away from their problems, and that's . Emma Denny is a queer author of LGBT+ historical romance stories about yearning, swordplay, and kissing in the woods.

Sometimes in historical romances they are written in a way that takes you longer to figure out what’s happening just because the prose is dense and unbending. With both Raff and Penn, their lies are found out by other people recognizing them, not because they owned up to their lies and just told each other.