Hunting for Trouble

He was never supposed to be real.

Ivy Marlowe restores other people's ruined things for a living — water-damaged manuscripts, torn maps, books nobody else thinks are worth saving. It's careful, quiet work. Nothing like the account she runs at 1 a.m., the one where she posts about the masked man who free-climbs downtown rooftops on camera, and jokes with three hundred thousand strangers about what she'd do if he ever climbed through her window instead.

It's a joke. It's always been a joke.

Until the joke lets itself in.

He was never supposed to want her back.

Ronan doesn't do attachments. He does jobs — quiet, dangerous, off-the-books jobs that pay him to disappear into other people's business and stay disappeared. The rooftop videos were never supposed to be about anyone. Then a comment from a girl with paint-stained hands and a smart mouth started showing up in his notifications, and somewhere between the fortieth video and the first night he stood outside her building without meaning to, disappearing stopped being the plan.

He tells himself watching her is harmless. He tells himself a lot of things.

But when someone else starts leaving marks on Ivy's world — closer, colder, far more dangerous than a man in a mask — Ronan has to decide how far he's willing to go to become the thing standing between her and the dark, instead of the thing hiding in it.

Ivy just has to survive finding out that the man she dared to break in was never the most dangerous part of the story.

He was just the one who got there first.

Hunting for Trouble is a fast-paced, high-heat New Adult dark romance with a morally grey hero, an anonymous-online-persona twist, and a "he falls first" slow-burn detonation. Content warnings provided at the front of the book.

Tropes: Stalker Romance / Morally Grey Hero / Anonymous Online Persona / He Falls First / Black Cat x Golden Retriever / Kink Friendly