Cupid's Curse
By Julian Frost
In a town that buries its secrets beneath Valentine's roses, two men must choose between the safety of walls they've built and the dangerous truth pulling them together.
Philip Mak came to Rosewood Harbor to disappear. Six months cataloguing dust-covered ledgers in a forgotten archive suits him perfectly—controlled, quiet, invisible. He has survived enough to know that caring costs too much. When the town's beloved florist turns up dead the week before Valentine's Day, everyone whispers about Cupid's Curse. Philip catalogues that too: superstition, not evidence. Until he notices what's missing from the dead man's counter.
Grant Evans fixes everything in Rosewood Harbor except his own past. When he finds his oldest friend cold on the flower shop floor, the handyman with the easy grin and capable hands refuses the official verdict of natural causes. He storms into the library demanding the one thing nobody in town wants to give him: the truth. Philip tries to dismiss him. Grant is impossible to dismiss. Their reluctant partnership begins with a squeaky hinge, a ruined pair of trousers, and a bargain neither of them expected to keep.
What starts as a missing ledger becomes a seventy-year conspiracy. As Philip and Grant decode Victorian flower language, excavate century-old journals, and expose the rot beneath Rosewood Harbor's festive facade, someone notices they're getting close. Smashed windows. Stolen evidence. A killer with nothing to lose and a politician with everything to hide. Every clue pulls them deeper into danger—and deeper into each other.
But the real investigation is the one neither man can admit he's conducting. Philip has spent years perfecting the art of leaving before he's left. Grant has spent just as long believing he deserves to be left. When the case forces them to choose between safety and something neither can name, walls built over lifetimes begin to crack.
A slow-burn forced-proximity MM mystery romance featuring a buttoned-up librarian, a golden-retriever handyman, and a deadly small-town conspiracy wrapped in the language of flowers.
