How to Write a Love Story

Ciara Sheridan inherits three things when her father dies: a crumbling estate on the Irish coast, a writer's block she cannot shake, and the outline for the last book in his nine-volume fantasy series. Frank Sheridan never finished the Ravian series. The closing volume, The Last Mountain, exists only as scattered notes.

Sam Avery arrives from a New York publishing house to see the manuscript through. He has read every Ravian book twice. He has two weeks to get a finished one out of Ciara, whichever way that takes. She writes crime novels under a pseudonym and would rather nobody connect her name to her father's.

Stuck together in a small coastal village through an unusually hot summer, the two argue over plot by day. By evening they find less to argue about. The deadline does not soften; the distance between them does. What starts as professional friction turns, slowly, into something neither of them planned for.

It reads as a contemporary romantic comedy built on that friction rather than instant spark. It gets funny where the deadline panic is, and quiet where Ciara's grief and the weight of her father's legacy take over. The romance is a slow burn, earned through the work rather than a single moment.