Love in La Terraza by Ethan Day
“A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.” – Stendhal
Cain Elliott has exhausted his hope to its very dregs, scraping through his reserves to come out at rock bottom with the certainty that he’s going to lose not only his home but the homes of his colorful and quirky tenants as well. La Terraza is the majestic old apartment building he inherited from his grandmother, the kind of place where, if walls could talk, you can be certain the stories you’d hear would be ones that would make you sit up and listen.
La Terraza has slowly been falling into a state of disrepair, a condition that Cain can’t keep up with financially because he’s the sort of landlord who cares more about the people who are a kind of surrogate family to each other than he does about the fact that he could raise their rents to cover the expense of the upkeep on his architectural masterpiece. Cain is between the proverbial rock and hard place because a corporation wants to buy his property, but to sell would mean to give up on his grandmother’s dream. To sell would mean to sell out and to surrender, and that’s not how Cain Elliott is made. Not to sell, though, means he and his tenants lose their homes anyway, which leaves Cain with little more to choose from than the lesser of two evils. It’s a hard position to be in when losing the place you’ve come to love means losing a part of who you are in the process.
Meeting the new man in town, Henry Abrams, doesn’t really untangle all the snags in Cain’s life, a life that’s as spare and stripped down as it could possibly be, yet is entirely complicated in spite of that simplicity. Cain’s designs on the architect, in fact, add yet another layer to the already complex set of issues he’s facing, especially when Cain discovers that Henry is working for “the enemy”, the architectural firm that is working to facilitate the sale of La Terraza to a real estate developer, not to preserve the classic building, but to tear it down. It’s the sort of maneuver that helps one to clearly understand that corporations are not people, which becomes even clearer when it’s revealed who is behind the manipulation and foul play. Business is business, and the corporate manipulator behind this deal is entirely without conscience.
Love in La Terraza is the story of two men who meet by chance but begin to build a relationship with clear intent, a relationship based on an undeniable chemistry and a bond that seems to run much deeper than the all-consuming sexual connection they’ve made. It’s a bond built on hopes and desires too, and it’s that need for each other that changes priorities and overcomes obstacles.
This is romantic Ethan Day, with all the charm and wit and brightly animated characters I’ve come to expect in his books.
Buy Love in La Terraza HERE.
