Thirty-five-year-old recently divorced Olivia Monroe moves back to her childhood neighborhood to start over. The house next door, once owned by her parents' best friends, is now home to their son—twenty-three-year-old grad student Liam Chen, who's grown from the awkward teenager she used to babysit into a confident, devastatingly attractive man. When a burst pipe forces her to stay at his place and proximity breeds temptation, they discover that some connections transcend age, history, and every reason they shouldn't want each other.
PROLOGUE
I'm thirty-five years old, freshly divorced, and I just moved back into my childhood home next door to the boy I used to babysit.
Except Liam Chen isn't a boy anymore.
He's twenty-three. A grad student in engineering. Six-foot-two of lean muscle, sharp cheekbones, and dark eyes that see far too much. And he's living in his parents' house while they're on a two-year teaching sabbatical in Singapore.
The last time I saw Liam, he was seventeen—all gangly limbs and nervous energy, buried in textbooks and building robots in his garage. I was twenty-nine, newly married, convinced I had my whole life figured out.
Now I'm thirty-five, single, and starting over in the house I grew up in after my marriage imploded spectacularly. My ex-husband left me for his twenty-four-year-old assistant. The cliché would be funny if it didn't still sting.
And Liam? Liam is somehow both familiar and completely foreign. Still brilliant, still ...
Dr. Scarlett Vaughn has spent over two decades as a psychology professor specializing in human sexuality, teaching courses on desire, taboo, and the forbidden. Her academic research into what draws people to transgressive fantasies led her to write the stories her students whispered about but rarely saw represented with depth and nuance. Writing from her Boston brownstone near the university, Scarlett explores the psychological complexity of forbidden attraction—age gaps, authority dynamics, and step-family scenarios—always with an emphasis on consent, emotional truth, and the healing power of accepting your desires without shame.
