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. 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. So when a beautiful single mom moves in next door, I’m going to fight that attraction tooth and nail.

Thing is, Maggie doesn’t want to be with me either. Her late husband was a Marine, and there’s no way she’ll let her daughter go through that again. Or herself.

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.

Romance on the Reef is book four in this sweet military romance series and is told from both points of view in the first person with alternating narrators. Each book can be read as a standalone but they are fun to read in order!

Jess Mastorakos