The Roommate's Vow : A Runaway Bride Contemporary Romance, livre ebook

Finn O'Connell was sixteen at his mother's funeral. His sister was six. Their father stood three rows back with his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets and did not look at either of them.
*I'm not a grown-up yet. I'm just your brother. But I promise you this, Maisie O'Connell: I will never leave you.*
He kept it. He is still keeping it, in their grandmother's house in Port Haven, where the mortgage sits on his shoulders *like a second spine*, the boiler makes sounds like a dying animal, and a water stain is spreading across the kitchen ceiling while he does the arithmetic.
That is why he is interviewing lodgers. A retired postal worker who likes audiobooks and gardening. A nursing student with a cat on gluten-free kibble that costs more per pound than Finn's deli meat. A man named Brad in a polo shirt who tries to haggle over rent before he has seen the room.
And then, eight minutes late with a coffee already leaking down his sleeve, Connor Walsh.
Connor draws graphic novels, is paid per project, works until two in the morning, and treats the interview like a set. He puts his cup down on the workbench and leaves a ring in the grain. He jokes about the cactus he overwatered, and then his voice drops out of the joke. *That's usually my problem. I care too much about the wrong things.*
Finn says no. He needs reliable. He has a sister and a house and nothing left over to carry anyone else with.
Then Maisie looks at Connor's portfolio and texts her brother: *The last guy. Connor. He's the one.* Because their mother used to fill sketchbooks with panels and characters, and Maisie remembers.
What follows is a war over the water heater, a paper lantern let go above the harbor, a wrecked hull turned into a door, a storm that takes the power, an ex named Derek who comes up from Boston and will not go home, and a friend of Finn's who quietly decides he would rather Connor left.
A contemporary small-town romance between two men, about a carpenter who has never once been allowed to want something for himself and an artist who has made a habit of being easy to leave. The romance is closed-door.