An old flame ignites new sparks in this small-town second-chance romantic comedy.
Feeling burned from a broken engagement and a flailing art career, Fiona just wants a peaceful place to recharge. A visit to her favorite aunt and her hometown is the perfect solution—except Jasmine Falls is also home to Alex Fox: a gorgeous, charming metalsmith who makes a room ten degrees hotter just by walking into it. Eight years ago, he broke Fiona’s heart. Now he has the nerve to act like it never happened.
When Alex sees Fiona, he’ll do anything to be near her. He never meant to hurt her, but if he tells her the real reason he dumped her, she might drive him out into the Congaree swamp and leave him there. Determined to win her back, he offers her a job she can’t refuse—one that he hopes will show her how much she belongs here.
The more time she spends with Alex, the more the sparks fly. She didn’t want to put down roots, but as she reconnects with old friends, she finds that Jasmine Falls has a bigger heart than she first believed.
Could this small town—and her first love—be worth another chance?
An old flame ignites new sparks in this small-town second-chance romantic comedy.
Feeling burned from a broken engagement and a flailing art career, Fiona just wants a peaceful place to recharge. A visit to her favorite aunt and her hometown is the perfect solution—except Jasmine Falls is also home to Alex Fox: a gorgeous, charming metalsmith who makes a room ten degrees hotter just by walking into it. Eight years ago, he broke Fiona’s heart. Now he has the nerve to act like it never happened.
When Alex sees Fiona, he’ll do anything to be near her. He never meant to hurt her, but if he tells her the real reason he dumped her, she might drive him out into the Congaree swamp and leave him there. Determined to win her back, he offers her a job she can’t refuse—one that he hopes will show her how much she belongs here.
The more time she spends with Alex, the more the sparks fly. She didn’t want to put down roots, but as she reconnects with old friends, she finds that Jasmine Falls has a bigger heart than she first believed.
Could this small town—and her first love—be worth another chance?
Eddie Gilmore was just a distraction. A really handsome one who was supposed to shake me out of my dry spell, but still—just a distraction. As I studied him from behind my easel, it dawned on me that this truly was my rock bottom: in the last six months I’d lost my home, my fiancé, and a commission that would have covered me for months. And now I couldn’t even paint a decent portrait.
Full disclosure: I was having two major dry spells. My romantic one was pitiful enough to inspire a hit country-western song, but my creative dry spell was the killer. It was costing me a fortune and ruining my reputation as one of the hot young emerging painters in the area.
Losing my creative mojo was super annoying. Not knowing how to fix the problem? Infuriating.
Two years ago, my friend Janet had started selling my paintings in her gallery in Asheville, North Carolina. It was a funky building in the River Arts District that got a lot of attention from both the locals and the tourists. For a while, my work had sold like hotcakes—Janet was pretty amazing at selling art—but then six months ago, my fiancé Dean yanked the rug out from under me and my whole world fell apart. Literally. Turns out, these pieces of my life were connected in ways I hadn’t expected. Now, at 29, my life was a pile of rubble.
Like, the-fall-of-civilization rubble.
After the Dean fiasco, Janet had taken pity on me and rented me her “tiny house”—the four-room cabin she usually rented as an Airbnb through the summer and fall. But now, six months later, I was behind in rent for the first time ever, and not at all happy to feel like a charity case. She was too nice to kick me out, but I knew what the going rate was for a weekly cabin rental in the peak summer season. There was no way I could stay.
Problem was, I had nowhere to go.
Shoving those thoughts aside, I tried to focus on Eddie instead. He sat in a leather chair just a few feet from me, lit by the warm glow of a stained glass floor lamp. I tried to concentrate on the line of his shoulders, but was distracted by the way his tee shirt strained against his biceps. Eddie had great arms: tan, muscular, and tattooed with vines and birds. He also had big brown eyes with lashes I’d kill for and a gaze that was firmly set to smolder.
He was the kind of guy you write pop songs and poems about.
Okay, I might have had a little crush on Eddie. We’d been friends for a while, and his family owned a winery a few miles outside of town. Whenever Janet ordered a case of wine for one of her gallery openings, he always brought me a bottle of my favorite pinot noir and did some A+ flirting that left me wondering if a little fling wasn’t such a terrible idea.
Tonight had been Janet’s idea—“You just need a muse,” she’d said. “Painting a live person will get you back into your groove.” Usually, she was right about these things. Eddie was certainly fun to study, so why, tonight, did each brushstroke look wrong the second it touched the canvas?
So far, this night had just made me realize how far I was from that groove—as in, completely outside it, a few counties over. Painting portraits had always been my way of loosening up and getting over an artistic block—it was fun to quickly capture light and personality in a few brushstrokes. But tonight, it wasn’t working. I had a pile of horrible paintings on the floor to prove it.
“You know, Fiona,” Eddie said, his eyes resting on mine, “When you asked me to come over and sit for you, I thought you were trying to seduce me.”
I blinked at him from around my easel, waiting for him to say more. It wasn’t always evident when Eddie was kidding.
“And yet here you are,” I said.
There was a hint of a smile. “Didn’t say I was opposed to the idea.” His eyes, brown with flecks of amber, zeroed in on me, sending a very distinct message that I was trying hard to ignore. I had rules, for heaven’s sake—and fawning over men like Eddie Gilmore broke the biggest one of all.
I was not allowed to get attached. Getting attached just led to heartache, and I’d had enough people walk out of my life already. You’d think by now I’d be used to it, with my heart a little harder, but you’d be wrong.
Being left was still the worst kind of hurt. It never stopped hurting.
“Shhh,” I told him. “I can’t paint your lips when they’re moving.”
Great, I thought. Now he knows I’m staring at his lips.
Eddie had an interesting face—okay, it was gorgeous—striking and chiseled, just like every other part of him. But you wouldn’t know that from this pitiful attempt at a portrait. It looked like I’d painted it using my feet.
Making the paint come alive used to come easy to me. But not now. The last time I’d hit a wall this hard, I’d been a junior in art school, terrified my scholarship would go poof when a professor looked at my portfolio and said I really couldn’t draw.
Later, it occurred to me that what he meant was I didn’t draw realistically, like he did.
My scholarship did not go poof. But my confidence did. I drifted away from the bright colors and exaggerated shapes, and painted in ways that earned me higher grades and fewer furrowed brows. I painted the wild colors in secret, and mostly felt like an impostor.
Now I felt like an impostor all over again. My eyes felt broken, not seeing the world the way they once did. Colors weren’t vibrant like before. Textures didn’t come alive. I kept adding layers of paint, but the result was nothing I could get excited about.
There was something very, very wrong about that.
“Hey," Eddie said, “Did you see that guy on TikTok that sells paintings that an elephant makes? He works at an animal sanctuary and just gave a paintbrush to the elephant one day. They sell for like ten-K each.”
Thanks, Eddie.
“I bet Janet would loan you her cat," he said. “We could train him to hold a little brush in his teeth. Or at least do enough creative editing to fake it.”
“She can’t even train that cat to use the cat door,” I said. "And besides, I’d prefer it if my career wasn’t based on a schtick.”
He raised a brow. “You’d really say no to ten-K per painting, just based on who was doing the work?”
“I will die on that hill, yes.”
After a pause, he said, “You're right. Maybe we could train him to knock paint buckets off the table and onto a canvas. That's more his style.”
* * *
It had started as a joke. Janet, trying to convince me to put paintings in her gallery, told me I can sell anything with the right story. So after a couple glasses of wine, I whipped out an abstract mountain landscape with shades of blue and green that looked vaguely like the local terrain if you squinted hard enough. Good luck, I said to her, and then she sold it the next day. When I called that a fluke, she said, “Bring me three more like that and let’s see who’s laughing, Miss Smarty Pants.”
She sold those, too.
I’d stumbled into a style that people liked, so I kept painting them, and Janet sold them as fast as I could deliver them. Then I started getting commissions: first a state senator’s wife, then a regional bank, and then a fancy hotel that wanted a show-stopping piece for their main lobby.
For the first time in my life, I had a savings account.
I made a living with a paintbrush. My dream. But then after Dean left, all of it stopped.
Every time I picked up the brush and started one of those stupid landscapes, I thought about him. And us. And what we were supposed to be. The mountains were supposed to be our forever home, and now as I tried to paint them, I just thought of everything I’d lost.
For the first time ever, it hurt my heart to do what I loved most.
The last straw was when I wrecked my biggest commission. It had been for this real-estate mogul who lived in a house big enough to have its own zip code. He’d commissioned three enormous paintings after seeing my work at Janet’s, and had offered me more money than I’d seen in my whole life. After Dean left, it had been absolute torture to work on those paintings. I kept asking him for extensions, hoping I could just soldier through the heartache and finish.
But I couldn’t. No matter how many hours I spent in front of those canvases, I couldn’t do it.
The real estate guy canceled the order, frustrated and tired of waiting. And then he’d blabbed to all of his bazillionaire friends about how I couldn’t deliver. And boy, word traveled fast in a circle that tight and a town this small.
Without that money, and with no new sales, I’d had to work for Janet in the gallery just to cover my bills. She was just trying to help because she knew I was burning through my savings, and the winter months were slow in a tourist spot like ours. But working there made me feel hollow inside.
Now it was April and I had no choice but to work there this season, until my work started selling again. But in order to sell paintings, I had to make paintings—and get over this block that had swallowed me whole.
Eddie, with his angular face, his close-cropped brown hair, and arms that I’d fantasized about a million times, was supposed to shake something loose tonight. Painting portraits had always knocked me out of my overthinking mode because it was easy for me to concentrate on the way light revealed shapes and expressions in a face.
But not today.
This painting was a mess, just like all the others I’d started and failed to finish in the last several months. It was more evidence that something in me was broken—and made me think too hard about Eddie’s suggestive stare and kissable lips.
Nope. Not happening. I’d sworn off dating ever since Dean.
“This house is pretty great,” Eddie said. “How long are you staying?” He had one of those North Carolina accents that was particular to the westernmost counties—all soft edges and dark promises.
A few miles outside of Asheville, the cabin was nestled in the woods, built up on stilts so you felt like you were in a treehouse. The tin roof made rain sound romantic, and the constant birdsong put me at ease.
“Just two more weeks until the vacation season starts. Janet has it booked through August already.”
Finding a long-term rental in this town was like finding a gold nugget.
“And then what?” Eddie said.
“That’s a great question,” I said. “I have no idea what to do next. I’m failing at everything.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he said. “You’re just going through a rough patch.”
People really needed to stop saying that to me. This felt way worse than just a rough patch. This felt like ten thousand miles of post-apocalyptic doom. Why did everyone try to make it sound like a problem that would just go away, like a leg cramp or a heat rash? Didn’t they see that this was an utter disaster?
Training that cat to knock paint cans over was looking better and better.
His eyes bored into mine. “What makes you happy?” he said. “Maybe you should start with that.” His voice was deep and smooth, and—good grief, I was hopeless.
“You make that sound so simple.”
He smiled. “I’m a simple guy.” He arched a brow and raked his eyes over me. “You seem very tense, Fiona. I think you need to relax and make time for a little self-care.”
I laughed, trying to hide the blush that was surely spreading across my cheeks. “Are you going to tell me you can help me with that?”
“I have some ideas.”
I bet he did.
“This is hopeless,” I said, motioning toward the painting. It barely resembled Eddie if I squinted my eyes.
Definitely a failure.
Eddie stood and moved toward me with his slow, easy walk that made it seem like he had all the time in the world. He looked at the painting, then down to the pile that I’d dropped to the floor.
“Looks like I need a haircut,” he said.
I snorted.
“Actually, I like this one,” he said. He rested his hands on his hips as he studied the painting. My eyes tracked his thumbs as they slid along the smooth leather of his belt. He had big square hands that gave firm handshakes and built Adirondack-style chairs in his spare time, and more than once I’d imagined what a firm grip they might apply to certain parts of my body in very specific scenarios.
A growing part of me was thinking that kissing Eddie Gilmore wasn’t such a terrible idea after all.
Brushing his finger over my cheek, he said, “You have a little paint here.”
His big brown eyes locked on mine and he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “You’re incredibly talented, Fiona. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.”
Eddie and I had been friends for a while now, and there was a time when I thought we might end up more than friends. But ever since Dean, it was hard for me to take the leap. Even with a nice guy like Eddie.
Nice guys could break your heart, too.
When his gaze dropped to my lips I thought for sure he was about to lean in and kiss me. I was still working out exactly how I felt about that when a piercing ring filled the room and I felt him startle.
“Sorry,” I said, ignoring the cell phone. “You were saying?”
He smiled and leaned closer, his breath warm against my neck as he started to whisper something about what he’d been thinking of the whole time he’d been sitting in that chair. He planted his hands on the kitchen island, on either side of my hips, and my heart pounded in my chest.
My rules seemed kind of stupid right now. Eddie had some great ideas.
The landline rang again, filling the cabin with an obnoxious tinny sound that made me curse Janet for being practical enough to have a phone that was not a cell.
“You need to get that?” he said, pulling away just a fraction of an inch.
“Nope. Janet’s answering machine works just fine.”
He grinned, sliding his hand along my arm, his thumb tracing tiny circles, and—nope, this did not feel like a bad idea anymore.
And then my mother’s voice pierced the air like a fog horn, and my hands fell to my sides.
“Yoo-hoo,” my mother said, her voice ridiculously perky. “I know you’re there, dear. Your little friend Janet told me you were staying over.”
Only Penelope McIntyre would refer to a thirty-four-year-old woman as her daughter’s “little friend.”
I gritted my teeth, trying to ignore the shrill voice.
“Hell-oooooo. I need you to pick up.” Her voice was oddly singsong. Chipper, even. “Pick up, pick up, Fiona. I’m waiting until you do. I have nowhere to be tonight and neither do you.” There was a tapping sound, like she was banging a pen against her phone, just to irritate me into submission.
Eddie froze, as if my mother had actually walked into the room.
Penelope McIntyre could ruin anything, even from two hundred miles away.
Fiona's life is a complete mess, not a masterpiece like her paintings. Her engagement ended in disaster. Even her career is taking a nose dive instead of taking off. She needs to take a break and the best place to do that is in the most peaceful place she can think of, her hometown. But the last thing she expects is to run into her old crush Alex at her aunt's house.
Alex Fox is gorgeous and charming, but he also broke Fiona’s heart and she hasn't gotten over it. What she doesn't know is that he liked her too and has always regretted ruining things between them. Unfortunately, he can't ever tell her why he had to run her off. Now, after going through a horrible divorce, he has a second chance to make things right with Fiona and hopefully win her heart.
Fiona isn't sure she can just forgive and forget but she also can't deny that she is still head over heels for him, and even worse, he lives next door so avoiding him is out of the question. Then Alex asks her for help with a fundraising project and Fiona can't help but agree. The more time they spend with each other, the more sparks fly and Fiona and Alex can't deny that they want each other.
Written in both Alex and Fiona's POV, this book was a fun, light romp that would make a great weekend beach read. There were moments that the romance felt like it happened quickly, but there was also a lot of history between the two main characters. Both of them had lots of pent up feelings so when they finally met up again, it was easy for them to fall for each other. Alex definitely had a great redemption arc, making up for his poor choices in the past. Overall this was an enjoyable story, but I definitely missed the steam level to help build the tension. For me, it kept me from becoming really invested into the characters romance and story. But that is just my own personal preference. For readers who want a sweet and clean romance with nothing explicit or graphic, this is absolutely the book for you. But if you are someone who wants to have a little sizzle, this is not the book for you. The subplot of the hunt for an extinct bird was a fun addition to the story, so if you are a birder or into bird-watching, this is a book that will catch your attention.