The Kinkades

A burned-out executive books two weeks of silence in the Maine woods and walks into a cottage that was never for rent. The woodworker who owns it has no intention of sharing it. Then the blizzard hits, and neither of them can leave.

Nine years alone at the edge of the Atlantic suit the lightkeeper fine. One trip to town a month, no questions, no company. Then a marine biologist arrives to study the tide pools at the base of his tower for a full semester, and she has no intention of leaving.

He came to Friendship to sell the inn his father left him and erase the last trace of a man he refuses to forgive. The candlemaker who talks him into staying has no idea whose name is on the deed. Or that her family is the buyer he turned down.

When a movie star is nearly killed on her property, the innkeeper tells one small lie to get into the ambulance: she's his girlfriend. He wakes up eventually. His estranged brother arrives first — and he's the only one who makes her wish the lie were true.

He fell for her in the thirty seconds before his best friend walked in and kissed her. Years later that friend is gone, she's pregnant and alone, and his family wants the baby. So the florist offers her the only protection he has: his name.

He's played every role Hollywood handed him, but fatherhood isn't a part he can fake. Hiding out on a beekeeper's farm in coastal Maine, he finds the one woman who never bought the act. Now the hardest role of his life is leaving.