The Vesper House Romances

Tess Navarro rescues sound from recordings everyone else has written off as blank. When Rowan Flint hires her to save what’s left inside the Vesper before demolition, she expects hiss and static. She doesn’t expect her mother’s voice.

Rowan is the architect fighting to keep the building standing, and he knew more than he told her when he hired her. He’s carrying a letter that could send her straight out the door. The longer they work side by side, the harder it gets to keep the job between them, and the more his silence costs.

It’s a slow burn that turns hot, in a building where the next sealed door might hold the one thing Rowan never told her.

Lark Brennan has built her career on trusting paper over people. Then a key ledger from the Vesper’s closed shoreline annex turns up with her own family name on it, signed six days after the building shut down. Twenty-seven years ago a worker named Luis Ortega went into that annex and never came home, and Port Meridian has called him a thief ever since.

Dev Malik is the engineer deciding whether the annex can be saved. He’s exact about everything, and he won’t bend a safety call for anyone, least of all the reporter who keeps asking him the hardest questions in public.

So they make rules. They even write them down. Then the evidence and the attraction start breaking every one of them.

Mara Quinn was hired to save a mural, not to rewrite anybody’s history. But under the paint on the Vesper’s lakefront wall she finds an older shoreline with landing names covered over, and a mark that leads straight to the Voss family.

Elias Voss has spent years turning down everything his last name offers. Now the record suggests a public path along the water may have been buried under a private claim his family still profits from, and the woman uncovering it is the one person he can’t keep his distance from.

The grant deadline is closing in, and the lake is icing over at the edges. Mara has always left before a place could claim her. This time she has to decide what’s worth staying for.