Inkheart Novels & Stories

Ava Reyes has spent four years doing what she does best — keeping her feelings exactly where they cannot do any damage. She is twenty-nine, co-owner of a thriving bakery, and hopelessly in love with the one man she has absolutely no business wanting. Marcus Calloway is her best friend's older brother — steady, brilliant, and infuriatingly easy to be near. When he left for London six years ago, Ava buried her feelings and moved on. Or did a convincing enough impression of it. Then Marcus comes home. Permanently. And he is engaged. His fiancée, Isabelle Ferreira, is a sharp London solicitor who is warm, intelligent, and impossible to resent. She has done nothing wrong. She deserves everything she has. Which makes what Ava is beginning to want all the more dangerous. Because the more Ava finds herself near Marcus — at family dinners, in stolen conversations, in the small accidental moments that keep finding them together — the more she notices things she shouldn't. The way he watches her. The way the air shifts between them when no one else is paying attention. She is not a woman who chases unavailable men. She has a conscience, and it is loud. But she is also a woman who is tired of being careful. What begins as a private war with herself slowly becomes something more deliberate. Ava doesn't set out to destroy anything. She simply sets out to make Marcus Calloway finally see her. What she doesn't account for is how much it will cost — and how deeply she will fall before she understands the difference between wanting someone and deserving them. Some fires don't care how carefully you've been living.