Romance on the Reef by Jess Mastorakos

It’s pretty hard to stay away from her when she moves in right next door…

I’m the jokester of the group. I always have that one-liner that lightens the mood, even in the darkest of moments. It’s just who I am. It’s who I had to be. I lost my wife eleven years ago when I was on my first deployment, so now I’m just trying to keep things light.
And because of that, I refuse to put my heart out there again while I’m a Marine. It’s not worth the risk. What if I’m gone and she needs me? Nope. Screw that.
So when a beautiful single mom and her daughter move in next door, I’m going to fight that attraction tooth and nail. Good thing Maggie doesn’t want to be with me any more than I want to be with her. Her late husband was a Marine, too. And there’s no way she’ll let her daughter go through that again. Or herself.
But we run in the same group of friends and now we share a wall. It’s not going to be very easy to keep our distance.
And we need to.
It doesn’t matter that sparks fly whenever we’re together. It doesn’t matter that her daughter is just as much of a book-nerd as I am and we get along great. And it definitely doesn’t matter that the three of us are somehow turning into a family without meaning to.
Because we both know what it’s like to lose the one you love, and that old saying about how it’s better to have loved and lost than not loved at all? We disagree.