Bound by Starlight and Steel: A Spicy Enemies-to-Lovers Fantasy Romance by Luvanya Bhattacharyya

She trusts only what her steel can hold. He knows only what the stars have shown him. When a darkness older than either of their kingdoms begins to swallow the world, they are the most dangerous combination imaginable — and the only hope left. Princess Lyra of Sunstone has built her life on certainties: the weight of a sword in her hand, the loyalty of soldiers under her command, and the iron conviction that anything she cannot see and touch is a luxury she cannot afford. When three border outposts fall to a force that warps stone and unmakes flesh, she is dispatched into the Dragon's Tooth mountains to retrieve the one person her king believes can explain the impossible — a star-seer who reads fate in the light of distant stars and has spent three years alone in the peaks, watching a doom no one else would listen to. Orion has been waiting for her. The stars showed him her face months before she arrived. What they did not show him was what it would feel like to stand six feet from her — fierce, armoured, and entirely convinced that he is a problem to be managed — and discover that the symbol he had been tracking was, in fact, a person. A person who would put herself between him and death before she had decided to trust him. A person who, against every calculation he had made about what the stars were asking of him, he was not going to be able to remain distant from. Forced to work together against a threat that steel cannot wound and starlight alone cannot seal, Lyra and Orion must navigate a growing connection that neither of them planned and both of them are singularly ill-equipped to handle. The fate of Atheria hangs on the strength of the seal they must restore. But the cost of that sealing — and the choice it requires — may demand more than either of them believed they had left to give. Read more