by Jen DeLuca
Part of Boneyard Key
First published 2024
Cassie Rutherford watched her friends pair off and start families, and her response was to bolt from Orlando and buy a historic cottage in Boneyard Key, a small Florida coastal town that built its entire identity around ghost tourism. The cottage has quirks. The outlets refuse to charge her laptop. The poetry magnets on her fridge rearranged themselves to spell out "WRONG" and "MY HOUSE." Cassie tells herself she is charmed. Nick Royer owns Hallowed Grounds, the local coffee shop, and he has made his peace with Boneyard Key's spectral reputation, including the ghost sharing his living space. He slips Cassie free banana bread with her coffee order and takes her on a ghost tour that goes deeper than the tourist script. They spend evenings together digging through the history of her cottage and its former owners, and something real starts to build between them. But Cassie is already questioning whether she jumped too fast into homeownership in a genuinely haunted house. And Nick has his own hesitation: he does not want to let someone in only to watch her decide this town is too strange and leave. The tension between what they both want and what they are both afraid of sits at the center of this romantic story set on Florida's ghost-loving coast.
Genres: adult, adult-fiction, ghost-stories, paranormal-romance, contemporary-romance, small-town-romance
Vibes: atmospheric, charming, cozy, intimate, romantic, whimsical
Tropes: forced-proximity, friends-to-lovers, second-chance, slow-burn
Setting: Boneyard Key, Florida, Orlando, Hallowed Grounds
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
325 pages · Paperback · Berkley