He has loved her for three years and never said a word.
She has spent exactly one New Year's Eve in his bed.
Six weeks later, she is knocking on his door with a secret that will change both their lives.
Lance Mullen came home to Cliffside Bay to be the kind of man he never managed to be in New York.
He quit the hedge fund. Built a little Cape Cod cottage on the bluff. Opened a small-town bookstore he used to wander into and wish he belonged in. And hired the quiet, heartbroken woman who walked in one Tuesday afternoon needing a job more than she was willing to admit.
That was three years ago.
Three years of unlocking the shop each morning and telling himself it was just business. Three years of quiet, unreturned devotion — because Lance Mullen has a gift, his friends like to remind him, for falling hopelessly in love with women who cannot possibly love him back.
Mary Hansen is the kind of broken Lance, on every count, knows not to touch.
Because Mary Hansen lost her daughter. And a marriage. And — she has quietly decided, looking at herself in the mirror and recognizing nothing — the hope she once had for any of it to ever mean anything again.
So on New Year's Eve, tired of grieving, tired of pretending, tired of the careful distance she has kept from every person who has tried to love her — Mary does something she has not done once in her entire, well-behaved life.
She gets wonderfully drunk. She walks up to Lance Mullen. And she asks him to take her home.
Lance wakes up a ruined man. Completely, irrevocably in love.
Mary wakes up with a plan.
She tells him it was a mistake. That they can only ever be friends. That nothing is going to come of this.
She means every word.
For about six weeks.
When Mary walks back into Lance's house — pale, shaken, turning a secret over in her hands — she does not know how to tell him she is pregnant. She does not know how to tell him it is what she has wanted for longer than she was willing to admit. And she cannot bring herself to tell him the pill she swore she was on... she wasn't.
What she gets, instead of the explosion she was braced for, is a marriage of convenience.
Lance — ever the fixer — has done the math. Her "incompetent cervix," the one that took her first daughter, means this pregnancy will be high-risk every week of the way. She needs specialists. She needs insurance. She needs the one thing Mary Hansen has always been worst at: accepting help.
So Lance insists on a wedding. A quick Vegas ceremony. An Elvis impersonator. A marriage on paper, for medical purposes only.
He does not tell her he plans to spend the entire nine months gently, patiently, stubbornly making her fall in love with him for real.
And Mary — terrified that if she opens her mouth, the truth of what she did to get this baby will come spilling out — keeps lying. To herself. To Lance. To everyone who tries to tell her she is lovable exactly as she is.
She has sworn she will not break this man.
She is about to find out that Lance Mullen does not break so easily.
Tainted is the fifth book in the Cliffside Bay series — an emotional, slow-burn, behind-closed-doors friends-to-lovers romance featuring a tender-hearted former hedge fund hero who has quietly loved her for years, a grief-scarred heroine haunted by the daughter she lost, an accidental-on-purpose pregnancy, a Vegas marriage of convenience, a high-risk pregnancy, a rescue dog, found family, and a love story about two wounded people learning they are still worthy of a second chance.
Because in Cliffside Bay, the most impossible love stories aren't the ones that break us.
They're the ones that finally refuse to let us stay broken.
