CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE
Love worth
making room for.
Fresh starts. Messy lives. The courage to be seen.
Welcome to the stories of Kimberly Bellamy.
MEET MAYA & CALEB
The Home We Build
Her fresh start comes with a few unexpected repairs.
At thirty-five, Maya Ellis is done waiting for someone else to decide her life can begin. Buying a house on Linden Street is her first big yes to herself. Then the kitchen ceiling opens up, a raccoon makes herself at home, and Maya’s carefully planned fresh start becomes an emergency repair.
Caleb Hayes knows how to save old houses. Patient, capable, and far too attractive for Maya’s peace of mind, he makes the work feel manageable—and being seen feel unexpectedly good.
But Caleb is keeping a secret that reaches beyond her front door. When a developer’s plans threaten the neighborhood, Maya must fight for the home she chose and decide whether the man she is falling for can be trusted inside it.
With opinionated friends, a stubborn pink bathtub, and a whole block refusing to be overlooked, Maya is building a life big enough for everything she wants. Love will have to earn its place.
Step into the storyA GLIMPSE INSIDE
It starts with a house.
“At 10:17 on Thursday morning, I became the sole owner of 418 Linden Street and approximately nine hundred ways to die.”
FROM THE OPENING OF THE HOME WE BUILD
Read the opening
The dying part was according to my mother.
The number was mine.
I had started counting during the inspection, when a man named Barry used the phrase not immediately hazardous four times in twenty minutes. Not immediately hazardous was apparently the real-estate equivalent of He’s complicated. It meant I was being warned. It also meant I was going to proceed anyway.
“One more signature,” the closing agent said, rotating another sheet toward me.
I looked down at a block of legal language dense enough to repel sunlight. “You’ve said that six times.”
“This one really is the last one.”
“That’s what my ex said about fantasy football drafts.”
Across the conference table, my realtor choked on her coffee.
The closing agent did not. In the forty-three minutes since I’d taken a seat in her aggressively beige office, she had displayed the emotional range of a printer. A very efficient printer, to be fair. She had produced forms at a rate I found both impressive and hostile.
An excerpt from The Home We Build by Kimberly Bellamy.
BEHIND THE STORIES
Meet
Kimberly.
Kimberly Bellamy writes emotionally grounded contemporary romance about women claiming full lives and the people brave enough to love them honestly.
Her stories blend sharp humor, found family, messy choices, and hard-won happily-ever-afters. The Home We Build is the first in her interconnected five-book romance series.
ON THE WRITING DESKThe Rules We Break · Book two, in progress
LET’S STAY CONNECTED
There’s more to the story.
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and what’s next on Linden Street.