Magdalene is imposing, but as her verbal sparring with Sam intensifies, her frosty demeanor begins to evaporate. With every amendment Magdalene makes to the catalogue of courses or line item she deletes from the budget Sam is there to challenge her. Sam finds herself as the spokesperson for the teachers, and they’re expecting her to stand up to every change Magdalene intends on making. Sam doesn’t know if she should laugh or cry. The imposing educator making her coworkers shake in their shoes is the same woman who’d shared her bed in New York. When Magdalene arrives, the teachers are shocked by her initial changes, but nobody is more shocked than Sam. Their greatest fear is that the new headmistress will turn the school into a lifeless husk of its former self. Her status as a ruthless reformer who puts efficiency above all else has the staff at Dragons in a panic.

With Three Dragons Academy on the brink of bankruptcy, Magdalene Nox is hired by the Board of Directors to radically overhaul everything about the crumbling institution. But three months ago, at a conference in New York, Sam spent the night with a woman who took her breath away and transformed her. Sam has successfully fought for the inclusion of a handful of queer students, and until recently that was enough. Dragons is very rich, very white, and very straight. She’s firmly in the closet as the school’s board and donors are still closely aligned with the institution’s original charter dating back to the 1800s. After briefly leaving Dragons to pursue her teaching degrees, she returned to become the chairperson of the school’s math department. Having been abandoned as an infant at the steps of the exclusive Three Dragons Academy, she’s grown up in academia, it’s the center of her world. Samantha Threadneedle is yearning for change.

The Headmistress by Milena McKay is just the kind of weighty age gap romance I look forward to getting lost in.

The headmistress by milena mckay