What Makes Us Stay

Maren Fraser has run the cafe across from the library for eleven years and has taken exactly one thing for herself in all that time, her Sundays. Luis Medina has been drinking her coffee at the third stool for nine of those years. He runs a survey crew for a living and answers the rescue alert when it sounds. He has never said a thing he could not measure.

When the landlord offers Maren the empty room next door on a ten year lease, the two of them are already more than friends. The question is what. Luis knows his answer the moment she asks. He also knows what saying it would cost her plan, so he says nothing and walks out past the morning’s first customer. Maren gives him until ten to six the next day. Then she signs alone, the way she has always done the things that matter.

Three weeks of silence. A storm on the pass. An old photograph that finally gives up its date. To come back to each other, he will have to stay in a room until the end of a sentence. She will have to open a decision she had already closed.

What Makes Us Stay is Book 3 in the Pinewake Rescue series. This interconnected standalone features friends to lovers, slow burn, a heroine who turns forty and makes the first move, a hero who says love first and still has to earn his way back, explicit open door intimacy and a complete happily ever after.