Single Dad, Next Door: A Grumpy-Sunshine, Small-Town Romance

Widowed firefighter Beau Callahan has nineteen rules, taped inside his refrigerator door. The first is Junie first. The fourth is nobody stays who can leave. Then a goat eats his hydrangeas. Dr. Poppy Finch has driven fourteen hundred miles to take over the old animal clinic in Wren's Landing, Maine. She is loud, she laughs too much, she has been told she is "a lot" by people who left, and she has never stayed anywhere longer than a school year. Within a week Beau's seven-year-old daughter has adopted her. Within a month Poppy is singing to a cat across his fence at midnight, and the man who fixes everything silently is building her a gate. But Beau holds her at arm's length for a reason. Three years ago his wife died on Harrow Bridge Road, and the story the whole town tells, that she was driving out for her little girl's medicine, is not true. He has kept the real one in a locker at the firehouse with a sealed letter he cannot open. And the old man who rented Poppy the house next door, the father of the woman Beau lost, has been watching them both with a look that is not quite hope. It is closer to dread. Poppy keeps her promises. That is her gift, and in Wren's Landing it may be the thing that costs her everything. Because the kindest secret she has ever kept is one she cannot tell the man she loves, and the fourteenth of December is coming, with a storm behind it. A slow-burn, steamy, emotional romance with a tall, commanding, protective hero who is hiding the worst night of his life; a sunny heroine who will not be managed; a seven-year-old who collects facts; a three-legged cat; a goat named Gerald; an unlooked-for mystery that has been sitting in plain sight for three years; and a love story about what it takes to come home after.