Beloved romance author Margot Bradley has a dark secret: she doesn’t believe in Happily Ever Afters. Not for herself, not for her readers, and not even for her characters, for whom she secretly writes Happily Never Afters: alternate endings that swap weddings and babies for divorce papers and the occasional slashed tire. But romance pays the bills and her readers are ride-or-die. That is until a super-fan hacks her computer for her latest manuscript and leaks her Happily Never After file instead.
With brokenhearted BookTokkers demanding a boycott of her books and her next publishing deal canceled, Margot decides to trade meet-cutes for murder. The fictional kind. Probably. Desperate for inspiration and an escape from L.A., she books a six-week stay in a remote Alaskan resort to write her murder mystery. But when she arrives and stumbles upon the grumpy, sickeningly handsome proprietor chopping wood, Margot fears she’s just landed in a romance novel plot instead. Lucky for her, she knows exactly how to avoid a cliché, and it doesn’t involve requesting more wood for her fire.
Dr. Forrest Wakefield has recently left his dream career as a cancer researcher to be a glorified bellhop. What he’s really doing at his family’s resort is caring for his stubborn, ailing father, but his puzzle-loving mind is slowly freezing over—until she shows up. Margot Bradley is a burst of sunshine in the frigid dark, and a mystery he’s itching to unravel. But Forrest doesn’t have any vacancy in his life for another person he could lose, especially since she’ll be gone faster than a flicker of the Northern Lights. However, as long snowy nights and one unlikely romance trope after another draw them together, they’ll each have to learn to melt the ice around their hearts before Margot leaves—or become a Happily Never After story themselves.
