Fern Moretti has always known where she's going next—and she's always going somewhere next. Until now.

At forty-something, Fern has built a life around work, travel, and never staying in one place long enough to get too comfortable. But when her next international assignment suddenly stalls, she finds herself back home in Alameda, California, with her eight-year-old daughter, her big Italian family, and a mother who is far too interested in what Fern's astrological chart has to say about her love life.

Then there's Marco Patris.

Handsome, charming, ridiculously orderly, and firmly planted in Alameda, Marco is everything globe-trotting Fern isn't. He likes his life—and apparently his house—just so. He's comfortably set in his ways. Fern is always planning where she'll go next. Yet from the moment they meet, she feels a pull to stay she can't quite explain.

When the grand opening of her father's second Italian bakery throws Fern and Marco together, she discovers he's not only a little Felix Unger-ish, but also bossy, opinionated, and far too accustomed to getting his own way.

And, unfortunately, ridiculously kissable.

Then things get even stranger. Marco's mother reads Tarot. Fern's mother comes from a long line of Sicilian women with a witchy heritage—and while Fern may roll her eyes at the spells, potions, and incantations, her mother is happily passing them along to Fern's eight-year-old daughter.

Fern doesn't believe magic or fate gets a vote in her future.

Her family has other ideas.

As Fern and Marco work side by side, the life she's spent years carefully constructing begins to feel a little less certain. Because the man who should make her want to pack her suitcase may be the very reason she can't seem to leave.

Funny, romantic, and full of Italian-family chaos, Merry-Go-Round Man is a forty-something romance about fated mates, astrology, Tarot, Sicilian witchy traditions—and discovering that sometimes love really is written in the stars.