The Red Line - Maria Lucia Esther Tomo

Lennie Samson just needs a job that pays enough to cover rent. What she gets is a babysitting gig for two kids in Kensington - and a boss, Rome Red, who is guarded, quietly protective, and impossible to read. She tells herself it's simple. A paycheck. Nothing more.

Then a day comes, and the new visiting professor walks into her Berkeley classroom. It's him.

Suddenly there isn't one line standing between them - there are two. Employer and employee. Professor and student. Every reason to keep her distance stacks higher, and every evening spent in his home, with his children curled against her, makes the distance harder to hold.

The Red Line is a slow-burn contemporary romance, told entirely through Lennie's eyes, about the walls we build to keep ourselves safe - and the quiet, stubborn way love finds its way around them anyway. It's about a single father learning to let someone in, a young woman learning she's allowed to want more than survival, and two people discovering that the hardest rule to follow is the one that was never really about rules at all.

Some lines aren't meant to be drawn.