Skin to Skin

The world disappears in your arms.

Cassia St. Cyr moved nine hours away from the only life she had ever known to disappear from a year that had nearly destroyed her.

The cottage she rents is small, charming, and cheap. The blue door has been waiting for her. The cliff path goes down a hundred and fourteen wet stone steps to the sea.

What she didn't know, when she signed the lease, was that the cottage isn't the only one trying to disappear.

Theo Marsh has been a widower for eighteen months. He has a nine-year-old daughter who reads books to him at the kitchen table, a porch board that gave out the week before Cassia arrived, and a kind of careful, quiet grief he doesn't yet know how to come out of.

They are not looking for each other. They keep meeting anyway.

At the grocery store. On the cliff path. In the rain at two in the morning, when neither of them can sleep, and a small low warm light in a window across the cedars asks the only question that matters.

He doesn't ask about her past. She doesn't ask about his grief.

Until they do.

SKIN TO SKIN is a tender, slow-burn contemporary romance about two people who arrive in each other's lives already broken, and the small specific moments - a stone weighting a bandage, a bay leaf on a saucer, a porch swing in February, a child's hand on an arm at dinner - that build a life back.

For readers of It Ends With Us, Beach Read, and Happy Place: a healing romance with a small-town setting, a single dad with a tattooed quiet, a heroine learning to be seen again, a daughter you'll fall in love with by chapter five - and a wedding by the sea you'll see coming and still not be ready for.

Trope stack: small town, single dad, two broken people, forced proximity, healing romance, found family, HEA.

Heat level: Open-door, sensual, with consent and care.

Includes a reading group guide.