She took the job for the money. Eight months, a Malibu estate, a private employer she'd never need to know. Enough to open her own restaurant by spring. Simple.
Except nothing about Julian Voss is simple.
Nora Flynn is the best chef she knows and the only person who can't see it. When she takes a live-in position at a cliff-edge estate, she expects professional distance, a world-class kitchen, and an absent heir.
She gets two of the three.
Julian has spent thirty-seven years managing a life he didn't choose, keeping the version of himself he actually wants locked in a room with one key. He has no intention of letting his chef dismantle that arrangement. Then she stays past midnight making marmalade in a copper pot, says something true, and he can't pretend he didn't hear it.
She's leaving in eight months. He's spent a lifetime not wanting things he can't keep. But in a kitchen at the edge of a California cliff, careful silences and shared meals have a way of becoming something neither of them planned.
A slow-burn contemporary romance for readers who want their love stories to ache before they land.