Cinderjack: The Cinderella Who Built Her Own Miracle: Volume Two - The Un-Noble Cinderella (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798184518480)

He climbed down a sea-cliff at dawn to return a shoe she'd thrown away. She has no idea what to do with a man who keeps giving her things.

Cindra Ashwick has survived two lifetimes by never being seen and never being kept. She builds, she runs, she takes what she needs and owes no one - and it has kept her alive. Then a captain with too-clean hands and a quiet, patient way of looking at her walks into her workshop, and refuses to leave, and starts returning the things she's thrown away.

She tells herself it's a working arrangement. She tells herself the skip in her chest is a malfunction to be diagnosed. She is, on the subject of this one man, a brilliant engineer lying very badly to herself - and he is falling, openly, for the soot-stained girl who can outbuild a kingdom and cannot, for the life of her, buy a bouquet.

But Cindra got everything the fairy tale promised - the ball, the prince, the glass-slipper moment - and the trouble it never mentions. A single dropped shoe. A pumpkin war-wagon with a grinning iron face and a star burning in its chest. A carriage that moved through the kingdom like a tremor, and a great many powerful people now asking the same dangerous question: who built it? Falling in love is hard enough. Falling in love while the whole realm hunts you - and the man who murdered your father begins, quietly, to ask about you - is a different kind of impossible.

She built her own way to the ball. Now she'll have to decide whether to let herself be caught.

Volume Two of Cinderjack. A sharp, funny, deeply romantic slow-burn romantasy about a heroine who refuses to sit still, the prince who loves her for exactly that, and the un-noble art of building your own happily-ever-after - one machine, and one terrifying act of trust, at a time.