Life in the little rustic town on California’s Central Coast had bored Brianna Bellflower to tears that summer she was sixteen. Other than the warm nights sitting next to a handsome cowboy at his granddad’s Leaning’ Tree Ranch. Returning to Rancho Lorena to sell her aunt’s old house a dozen years later, city girl developer Bree finds that the cowboy still stops her breath. But is she over her cheating fiancé?
With the Leanin’ Tree in financial trouble, Akron McCrory knows all about developers swooping into wide, wild spaces and changing things up. But he, too, remembers those sweet summer kisses a half a lifetime ago. He and Bree are all grown up now. Will their involvement at a safe house for needy moms lead them on a path together they never expected? Even as they longed for it way back when?
EXCERPT
She needed caffeine, bad. The map app’s
three-hour-and-fourteen-minute drive along the coast had mutated into five long
hours when her destination came into view. Her heart warmed, pittered. Rancho
Lorena. The Leanin’ Tree Ranch.
A girl never forgot her first kiss. Would
she see him again? He’d come back to stay, hadn’t he?
The charming little cowboy town, with
buildings wearing dates from 1887, boasted a modern coffeehouse nestled on a raised
boardwalk. An empty parking spot right in front of the Brew Basket embraced Bree
with invisible arms. She’d get some fortification, and quick.
Across the spread of ranch land, a far-off
mountain range gleamed with snow-tipped peaks. Camel-brown hills hugging the
valley wore wisps of green grass from January’s brief rains. She slid from the
car. The scent of horses on the wind instead of diesel up her nose started long
ago memories glimmering inside her head.
Akron. Akron McCrory. How could he hitch
her breath twelve years after?
