Adam Voss is thirty-four, newly divorced, and forty-three pages deep into a custody motion that says he can't do this alone. His lawyer wants him to hire help before the hearing. His neighbor has a daughter who just finished high school and needs the hours.

Hazel Bell is eighteen and has been waiting her whole life for something to happen to her. She has a bookstore job, an unfinished community college application, and a bedroom ceiling she never repainted. Three afternoons a week in the house across the cul-de-sac is supposed to be a job.

It is a job. For a while.

Then it is a kitchen at four in the afternoon, and a man who has not been looked at in two years looking back. Then it is a locked bedroom door and a decision neither of them can unmake. Then it is a positive test in a bathroom at her parents' house, and a custody fight with a new front, and two families on the same short street who now have to say the thing out loud.

He has everything to lose. She has never had anything to lose before. Neither of them stops.

The Babysitter Next Door is a standalone forbidden age-gap romance with a much older single dad, an unplanned pregnancy, a slow-building attraction that neither character goes looking for, and a family that gets built anyway. No cheating, no cliffhanger, and a hard-won happily ever after. Contains explicit sexual content and is intended for readers 18 and older.