THE GUEST HOUSE

It’s an old story—maybe one of the oldest: boy from one family meets girl from rival family, boy and girl fall in love but family loyalties battle to keep them apart.

When I set out to write THE GUEST HOUSE, I didn’t plan on star-crossed lovers. I imagined a rambling, shingle-style cottage by the water that collected secrets, like a beachcomber collects sea shells, summer after summer, year after year.

I had known such a cottage, and was fortunate to spend a summer on its grounds when I was nineteen. Even though I lived in an apartment about the estate’s stables, I was very much aware of the stature—and the mystique—of the main house. It sat empty for much of that summer, which hadn’t always been the case. For generations, it had hosted one family and many of that family’s friends and relatives. Even quiet, what struck me, day in and day out, was how its history seemed to quietly seep out of it—and how many stories over the decades must have come to life inside it.

It was this sense of history in a house, this idea of a single setting that gathers people and hearts to the same place, season after season, that ultimately gave me the love story that is at the center of THE GUEST HOUSE.

I loved the idea of history repeating itself—and the one man who comes along determined to break the cycle of heartbreak. For Lexi Wright, Cooper Moss is that man. Unlike the Moss men before him—his father Tucker and his older brother Hudson—Cooper is determined not to let misguided family loyalties sway his passions from their course. But after finding her heart broken by Cooper’s older brother, the same way her mother found her heart broken by patriarch Tucker Moss, can Lexi trust that this love will be strong enough to overcome the pain of the past?

Only the house knows.

And, of course, you, dear readers.