Hysteria: A Dark Gothic Victorian Romance (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798246188552)

Her husband calls her hysterical. Her doctor knows she is trapped.

London, 1895.

For five years, Hulda Crowle has been watched, controlled, and punished by a husband who can transform every act of resistance into evidence of madness. Now Orlando has found the perfect way to silence her permanently: a Harley Street physician willing to treat her supposed hysteria-and create the medical record needed to have her committed.

Dr. Romeo Bowditch knows hysteria is a profitable lie.

Once a bare-knuckle prizefighter in Whitechapel, Romeo now earns his living administering discreet mechanical treatments to the wives of London's elite. He tells himself that the release he provides is kinder than the ice baths, restraints, and locked cells waiting inside the asylums.

Then Hulda enters his consulting room.

Silent, bruised, and fiercely intelligent, she understands exactly what is being done to her. She is not ill. She is being erased.

What begins as a treatment neither of them truly believes in becomes something chosen: a secret refuge, an erotic awakening, and a forbidden attachment that could destroy them both. But Orlando's plan is more calculated than Romeo realizes. On Hulda's twenty-fifth birthday, a vast inheritance will become hers-unless her husband can have her declared mentally incompetent first.

With commitment papers closing in and every respectable institution prepared to believe Orlando, Hulda must decide whether to submit, disappear, or place her life in the hands of a doctor whose touch has become the only place she feels free.

Romeo can help her escape.

But freedom will require false identities, ruined reputations, bloodshed-and a grave no one must ever find.

Set amid fogbound consulting rooms, private asylums, and the brutal legal machinery of Victorian marriage, Hysteria is a dark, explicit Gothic romance about medical abuse, forbidden desire, survival, and two lovers willing to become monsters rather than remain victims.