He came for the job. He stayed for the person he couldn't file.
Ronan Carrick is twenty-seven and built for work. His plan is clean: two years in Manchester on a good construction job, close to his brother. He's planned for less.
Then he meets Celyn at a corner table in a bar. Red nails on a keyboard. A mouth that keeps talking about a bloke who sent back his steak at a steakhouse, while the hands move and Ron stops tracking words.
Celyn Beynon is twenty-five and Welsh, and they exist on their own terms. They wear what works that day: a skirt and Dr Martens, or stubble under eyeliner. They don't fit the files Ron's been building his whole life, and they've made peace with the people who can't hold that. Weekends they serve; the rest of the time they're writing a novel. And they don't know the tall man at the bar is trying to sort them into a space that doesn't exist.
For weeks, Ron watches. For months, he sits at the corner table and learns that the thing between them has no name in his head. Celyn doesn't ask him to name it. They just ask: stay.
What you'll find:
- a first-person, single-POV slow burn in Ron's concrete, body-forward voice
- an opposites-attract romance with a non-binary Welsh lead who exists without explanation
- a British setting from Manchester's Northern Quarter to South London
- explicit, fully consensual on-page intimacy with vers dynamics and no fade-to-black
HEA guaranteed.
Book 2 of the Carrick Brothers Duet. Can be read independently of book 1.
