Juliet Morgan THE LAST SEAT

One missed train changed everything. When interior designer Emma Carter misses the last train home after a concert, she finds herself stranded at Brentwood Cross station with nothing but bad coffee and three hours to spare. In the waiting room, she meets a stranger - Noah, an architect with dark eyes and a quality of stillness she can't quite name. They talk. Really talk. About work, about fear, about what they each want from the lives they're building. By the time dawn breaks and the train pulls into Millhaven, Emma knows she has met someone she will never forget. Then they walk away. No phone numbers. No last names. No way back. Five years later, Emma lands the biggest commission of her career: the interiors of Azure Cove, a luxury lakeside resort that could transform her practice overnight. The architecture is extraordinary - honest, considered, designed by someone who understood exactly what a building should feel like from the inside out. The architect is Noah Bennett. He remembers her. She never stopped thinking about him. And the connection that formed in three hours on a late-night train has not, it turns out, gone anywhere. But Noah's life is no longer his own. He is engaged to Victoria Sinclair - Emma's brilliant, warm, and wholly admirable new boss. As Emma and Noah work side by side through the months of construction, finishing each other's sentences about load-bearing walls and window proportions, the truth neither of them wants to face becomes harder to ignore. Some connections don't disappear with time. The Last Seat is a slow-burn contemporary romance about the gap between the lives we plan and the people we become. It asks a question most of us have quietly carried: can the right person arrive at the wrong time - and still find their way back? With precise, literary prose and a cast of characters who behave with moral complexity and genuine warmth, this is a love story told at the speed of real feeling - through blueprints reviewed in silence, bad coffee shared in a storm, one dance at the end of something, and a train ticket kept in a drawer for five years. For readers who believe that some meetings are not accidents, and that the hardest choices are the ones where no one is the villain. A captivating contemporary romance about fate, timing, and the journeys that change us forever.