She had sixty days to make Sicily home. She wasn't expecting home to have blue eyes and an attitude problem.
When Natalie Russo's Italian citizenship application is rejected, the clock starts: sixty days to find another way to stay ? or give up the dream that pulled her across an ocean and go back to a Boston winter she's spent a year trying to forget.
The only person who can help is the last person she wants to ask. Alessandro Leone ? the maddeningly composed lawyer who lives upstairs, who has watched a parade of starry-eyed foreigners chase the Sicilian fantasy and leave, and who has clearly filed Natalie under temporary. He expects her to give up. He hasn't watched her lose a fight with a stuck five-hundred-year-old door and come back angrier.
Against his better judgment, Alessandro agrees to help her untangle her family's history ? and the deeper they dig through mountain villages and lemon groves and records nobody was meant to find, the harder it gets to keep their arrangement strictly professional. Forced proximity becomes shared dinners. Shared dinners become the kind of quiet that says too much. The grumpy lawyer who doesn't do feelings and the sunshine American who feels everything are falling, and they both know it's a terrible idea.
So when Alessandro offers her a marriage of convenience ? the clean, sensible fix to all her problems ? Natalie says no. She didn't cross an ocean to be someone's paperwork. If she's staying, and if he's hers, it won't be out of pity. It'll be because he finally fought for something he wanted.
Now Alessandro has to decide whether the most controlled man in Sicily can do the one reckless thing that matters: tell her the truth before her time runs out.
Set among the sun-warmed villages, crooked streets, and lemon groves of Sicily, To Stay in Sicily is a witty, swoony, slow-burn romance about stubborn hearts, second chances, and finding home where you least expect it.
Perfect for readers who love:
• Grumpy/sunshine romance with a hero who falls first and falls hard
• A marriage-of-convenience offer that gets refused
• Forced proximity, slow burn, and a satisfying open-door payoff
• A fish-out-of-water American abroad and an authentic Sicilian setting that reads like a holiday
• Found family, small-village community, and a guaranteed happy ending
A standalone romance with an HEA ? Book One in the Love in Translation series.
"A gorgeously written escape that will have you booking the next flight to Sicily ? and believing some love stories are worth crossing oceans for."
