Someone Worth Waiting For

She drove toward the fighting when everyone else was driving away from it. There were children still inside the building.

Sophie Mercier is thirty-two, a humanitarian aid worker who has spent her adult life running toward crisis and away from connection. Three months past her rotation end date and still here, because the children in this city have nowhere else to go - and because somewhere along the way, staying in danger became easier than staying in Montreal. The only rule she's kept: don't let anyone close enough to lose.

Amin Hassan is thirty-three, a resistance fighter who has already lost everything the regime could take. His fiancée killed in a strike on a school. His brother taken in the night four years ago and never found. He keeps fighting not because he expects to survive, but because stopping would dishonor everyone who didn't.

When a strike collapses the building beside her, Sophie shelters in the basement with a wounded stranger instead of evacuating. What follows are two weeks underground, under siege, surviving on rationed water and hard-earned honesty, as well as the slow bewildering discovery that two people can know each other completely in the space of a war.

The deal is simple: He needs to live. She needs to leave.
The problem is: Neither of them can before feelings get involved.

As the regime crumbles and a city fights for its freedom, Sophie and Amin discover that the most dangerous ground they'll cross isn't the street outside the basement door - it's learning to stay, and to choose each other, when every instinct says run.

A deeply human clean romance about two people who found each other at the worst possible moment, and chose each other anyway.

Book 2 in the Where We Begin Again series - four interconnected standalone clean romances about complex characters finding healing and hope through love during life's most difficult moments. Each novella can be read independently in any order.