Home at Last
by Lily Everett
Series: Sanctuary Island, #6
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Release Date: March 7, 2017
Home is where the heart is…
Marcus Beckett left Sanctuary Island after his mother’s funeral, and he hasn’t been back since. Until now. Needing a change from the high-risk, high-stakes life of a bodyguard, Marcus makes a solitary life for himself running the neighborhood bar in his hometown. His only mistake? Seducing and then dumping the town’s sweetheart, Quinn Harper. Marcus knows he did the right thing—a good girl like Quinn has no business with a broken man like him. But now no one will come to his bar, and he’s watching his last chance at a peaceful life go up in smoke. So when Quinn proposes a fake four-week courtship, he can’t refuse…even though he knows it’s a bad idea.
It’s a romantic charade that will buy Quinn time to distract her mother and father from their own marital problems—and will help Marcus welcome back some paying customers. But what begins as an engagement of convenience slowly transforms into a deeper connection, one that heals both of their hearts. . .and ignites the simmering passion between them. Could it be that pretending to be together is just what Quinn and Marcus needed to give their real love a second chance?
There’s so much to love about Sanctuary Island and Lily Everett once again delivers a romance that shows off the quirky, small town personality that sets the stage for her stories. There’s a fake engagement, second chances at love and family ties, a scam artist, and of course all the wonderful personalities that make up this tight-knit town.
Although this was Marcus and Quinn’s story, Quinn’s parents played a big role in everything that goes down – especially when Quinn finds out that she may be one of the contributing factors to her parents’ marriage problems. Asking Marcus to pretend to be her boyfriend seems like the best plan of attack to show her parents that she is settling down…but when Marcus suddenly announces they are engaged and then Quinn’s parents want them to move in with them for a couple weeks for some serious marriage/family counseling, it’s only a matter of time before the act become more real than show.
Marcus and Quinn were seriously hot together. You could always feel the underlying sparks that would fly every time these two would even so much as think about each other. It was fun watching them both try to keep their arrangement in the friend zone – especially when they had to share Quinn’s old room.
But of course those sparks made it near impossible for them to keep their hands off each other – especially when they had to share a bed.Then she wondered what the hell was the matter with her. It was a bed. They were adults. Sleeping next to each other didn’t mean they were automatically going to cross some invisible, arbitrary line. She wasn’t going to roll over in her sleep and accidentally impale herself on his penis. They’d be fine.
Quinn, who’d twitched at the sound of her mother’s voice, dropped her hands from Marcus’s neck to throw an arm over her eyes and hide her red face. “Coming, Mother.”
Some devil prompted Marcus to lean down and whisper, “We could be, if she’d waited five minutes.”
Quinn convulsed in shocked giggles under him, which made Marcus grin instead of grimacing while trying to smoothly remove his hand from her underwear. His dick, like most dicks, had no sense of time or place for the inherent unsexiness of nearly getting caught in the act by his girlfriend’s mom like a couple of teenagers.
No, his dick still thought the original morning plan was A-OK, ready for action, go go go. But Marcus was in charge, so instead of following orders from below the belt, he swung off Quinn.
Quinn’s parents were struggling to find a new normal now that her dad had retired. Their marriage was hitting some serious bumps and the marriage counselor they have brought in may have more than counseling on his agenda – and he has sucked Marcus and Quinn into his counseling drama. Watching Quinn’s parents struggle was heart-breaking at times and I found myself rooting for them to get their happy ever after as well. You could just feel the love pouring off of her dad and the frustration coming from her mom, and it was so hard to see them both so hurt.
Marcus also has some issues from his past he needs to deal with, namely settling things between himself and his father, a man he hasn’t spoken to since he left home after his mother died. He’s always blamed his dad for not letting him know sooner that his mother was closet to dying, which denied him the chance to come home to say goodbye before she passed. And when Quinn goes to visit Marcus’s dad and we find out there is something important that Marcus needs to know but he’s too bull-headed to go see the man and find out, I couldn’t help but keep hoping that Marcus would man-up and at least see his father and maybe start the healing process.
One of the things I really liked was that when Marcus and Quinn realized that their attraction may have run deeper than the physical, they both agreed to try and see where a relationship may lead – not a lot of angst and drama around it, they both just came to the same conclusion and decided to see where things went. And with the drama surrounding Quinn’s parents, it was nice not to have to deal with too much drama between these two.
Once again I was captivated by all the happenings on Sanctuary Island. The townspeople all play a part in adding color and personality to these books, and as I’ve said before, I think this is a place I’d really like to find on the map. Even though this is a series I think you can easily read this one as a stand-alone. Marcus and Quinn show up in the previous book, but I don’t think their story loses anything if you start here. I would definitely recommend this book and series as one to try!
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