Rain beads on the glass. On the bench lies a folded note — When you're ready. Inside a room that isn't meant to save anyone, two people learn the slow grammar of care.

Borrowed Skin is an intimate, book-club romance about consent, ritual, and the quiet courage it takes to begin again. In a coastal Irish town where storms roll in without asking permission, a woman tired of surviving finds a set of rules that promise steadiness: ask first, go slow, name what hurts, name what helps. The room where those rules live is simple — linen, warm light, the hush of rain — and yet it changes everything. What begins as structure becomes sanctuary; what begins as distance becomes a bench where sitting side by side feels like breathing right.

He carries his own history of leaving things half-mended. She carries the kind of silence that looks like strength until it cracks. Between them: a brass key stamped THE ROOM, a string-tie envelope marked RULES, and a ritual of aftercare — tea, water, blanket, rest — that turns tenderness into action. Boundaries aren't walls here; they're doors that open when you're ready. When the past arrives with receipts, they'll have to decide whether rules are a hiding place or a way through.

With elegant prose, cinematic atmosphere, and Laura Carpenter's signature consent-forward heat, Borrowed Skin offers a love story that feels lived-in: storm light on tide-glass, a steady hand, a whispered green / amber / red, and the radical notion that healing can be shared. For readers of romance who crave heart, craft, and grown-up stakes, this is a novel about remaking a life one careful promise at a time.

Content notes (gentle): themes of grief recovery, trauma-aware intimacy, on-page aftercare; always consensual; no cheating; no villainised exes.