Some portraits preserve a family's history. Others were painted to destroy it.

Months after unexpectedly inheriting half of Number Seventeen, widow Marian Quenell and decorative artist Elspeth Cattermole have settled into an arrangement London society would find difficult to name. They share a house, a bed, and an attraction neither can deny?but they have yet to agree what either woman is entitled to expect from the other.

Then restoration work reveals another painting hidden beneath a respectable family portrait.

The concealed picture shows two women sitting together with unmistakable intimacy. One wears a distinctive piece of jewelry Marian recognizes from her own family. Before Marian and Elspeth can learn who the women were, a stranger offers an extraordinary sum for the damaged portrait?and someone soon proves willing to do far more than pay for its disappearance.

Their investigation leads into a decades-old inheritance, a woman officially declared dead who may have lived for years under another name, and a family fortune built partly upon an erased identity. But the secrets inside Number Seventeen are not the only ones threatening Marian and Elspeth.

When Marian secretly rearranges their finances to protect the woman she loves, Elspeth sees not devotion but control. Jealousy, pride and several deliberately separate nights force them to confront a more dangerous question than anything hidden beneath the paint:

Can two women build a life together when they cannot even agree what belonging to one another should mean?

The Portrait Behind the Hearth is Book Two of The Women of Number Seventeen, an atmospheric Victorian gothic romance series about buried histories, domestic mysteries, forbidden love, and two complicated women creating a place in the world that belongs to them.