Claire
A few hours after losing my job, I get a call from a stranger who claims I’ve inherited property from my father. I assume it’s a scam, because my dad is very much alive. Turns out my mother is the liar.
I board a flight to my bio-dad’s hometown, hoping for answers, but the turbulence is so bad I worry we won’t make it. Declan, the hot, tattooed hunk next to me, is obviously terrified too. When the plane freefalls for half a second, he kisses me with the passion of a man who thinks he’s about to die. He seems to regret it immediately afterward—and we both regret it when we discover he’s my new next door neighbor, a complication neither of us wants.
To make matters worse, it turns out my bio-dad’s cabin is only half mine. The rest belongs to a half-sister I didn’t know I had—Nicole, a pink-haired private investigator and possible psychopath.
If I weren’t unemployed and broke, I’d leave, but this crappy half-a-house is my only possession. So I stay in the hopes that I can convince her to sell. Unfortunately, she seems intent on setting me up with Declan, among other manipulations, and her matchmaking tactics are…extreme.
Declan
I came to the mountains to hide and be left alone, and now I’m never alone.
Every time I turn a corner, I run into Claire Rainey. She’s tempting as hell, particularly now that I’ve had a taste of her, but I know better than to wrap her up in my trouble—or get wrapped up in hers.
Claire’s life is really changing. She lost her job of seven years and shortly after gets a life-altering call from a strange woman – a VERY strange woman in fact (Nicole). In one brusque phone call, Claire learns the father she adores isn’t her biological dad AND that the bio dad she didn’t know existed has recently died. Nicole summons her to Marshall NC to collect her inheritance and Claire’s adventure begins. It starts with a harrowing plane ride where she’s stuck between an eccentric older woman with lots of sass and the hottest guy she’s ever seen. Did I mention Claire is day drunk when she boards the plane? She woke up intending to drown her sorrows and didn’t expect to go anywhere that day.
Her snarky seatmate has a lot to say about her drinking, but when the plane hits serious turbulence, she passes a flask and ends up being pretty cool. The hot guy on her other side doesn’t like to fly and is sure he’s going to die today so he grabs the beautiful woman next to him and kisses her senseless. Then the plane moves into calmer skies so the danger passes and in the calm after that storm, Claire doesn’t know what to think about anything. But her trip only gets stranger from there.
Declan isn’t just her neighbor on the plane, he’s also her neighbor in her dad’s cabin, the one she has to stay in for a month in order to get her inheritance. He was friendly with her dad but mostly keeps to himself because Declan has secrets. It’s not an accident that he lives far from home, high on a mountain with just a single neighbor. Claire soon learns Nicole is her half-sister and their father ay have been murdered but nobody’s sure so she’s expected to help Nicole and Damien investigate his death.
I really loved the characters because Claire and Declan were so easy to like and so much fun. This book is funny and sweet with a mystery, too. It’s also a page-turner with lots of twists and turns so I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. The love story is super slow-burn which I usually dislike but it works just fine here because there’s so much happening, it would be weird if they got together sooner. This is a great start to a new series and a good example to show why the author is one of my absolute favorites. I’d like to thank the author and The Author Agency for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
