The Ashgrove Symphony

Ashgrove Hall, Leeds. A mid-sized professional orchestra with its own board, its own players' committee, and ninety people who have sat in the same rows for years and can read a conductor's attention from the back of a section. Wet coats in the yard behind the stage door. Rosin. Parts and bowings sent out by a fixer who has been in the building since seven.

The Ashgrove Symphony is a series of standalone contemporary romances set inside that institution, and the institution is the engine. Screened first rounds where the panel cannot see who is playing. Probationary seasons on a new appointment. A players' committee, a union route, and a chief executive who runs a review straight and does not soften it. When two people in this building want each other, procedure is not the obstacle to the romance — it is the shape the romance has to take.

These are quiet, exact books about people whose whole training is attention: hearing a thin edge on a note from across a hall, noticing a half-second before a bow moves, knowing what somebody meant by how they breathed in. The heat is unhurried and the precision is the point.

Each book is a complete standalone contemporary romance with a guaranteed HEA. Read in any order — start with The Half-Second Before.