My Favorite Lost Cause
My stepbrother’s estate is fading fast. My resistance to him is fading faster.
When my marriage hits rock bottom, I escape to South Carolina to help my charming disaster of a stepbrother, Charlie—aka "the douchiest man in Manhattan"—fix up the decaying Southern mansion he's just inherited.
But the house has other ideas. Doors slam, voices whisper, and something—or someone—wants us to be more than reluctant roommates. An old journal confirms it: Charlie and I seem to be mirroring every step of a love story that took place a century ago.
A doomed one.
With every soft moment and stolen glance, it gets harder to imagine ending up with anyone else. But all I’ve ever wanted is a family, and that won’t be happening with a man who once said he’d rather be murdered than father a child.
Our story was written long before we came to this house. But do we still have time to rewrite the way it ends?
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Elizabeth O'Roark
Elizabeth O’Roark writes the kind of romance novels that pull readers in with sharp banter and irresistible chemistry, then keep them turning pages long after midnight with emotional depth and vulnerability. Best known for Waking Olivia and the bestselling Deal With the Devil, her stories often feature alpha heroes who hide their scars behind gruff exteriors and women who are complex, flawed, and fiercely alive.
Her path to writing wasn’t direct. Before publishing her first novel, she built a career as a medical writer, creating content about procedures and diagnoses. That precision with language and detail now slips into her fiction, giving even her most escapist plots a grounding in reality. She lives in Washington, DC with her three children, balancing family life with a steady output of romances that span from the sun-soaked beaches of The Summer Series to the time-twisting turns of The Parallel Series.
The Favorites
Love rarely begins in the places we expect. In The Favorites, relationships ignite in the middle of disasters, grudges, and family secrets, reminding us that the path to desire is often paved with tension and vulnerability.
The first book drops readers onto the slopes of Kilimanjaro, where Kit Fischer is forced to climb alongside Miller West, the man she swore she would never forgive. Forced proximity, thin air, and long nights under the same sky peel back their defenses until hostility gives way to something harder to deny. In the sequel the tone shifts from mountain cliffs to a crumbling Southern mansion, where old journals, peeling wallpaper, and uneasy step-family ties create an atmosphere thick with history and unspoken longing. Here, resentment blurs into attraction, and the question is not whether they will fall, but whether they can survive the wreckage of what came before.
The Favorites consists of three books and series is set to expand with the upcoming release of one more book. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
