The Arden Road - Paperback

She built a quiet life on a farm in rural Indiana. She just didn't know someone was already looking to destroy it.

When Molly James arrives in Follett Township, she isn't using her real name. She chooses the farm for reasons she can't say aloud: it can't be seen from the road, the previous owner had a thing for fencing, and she needs to disappear. She names it The Arden Road and begins, carefully, to build something that looks like a life: French Angora rabbits, a pair of horses, a black Lab named Stella, and a spinning wheel turning in the evenings while the fire burns low.

But someone has been walking her fence line. And someone has been cutting it.

Jack Gibson, the newly appointed mayor of Follett, has his own quieter trouble: a predecessor who died in February with a secret on his legal pad, a sheriff who is rarely reachable, and a series of strange incidents accumulating in a town that runs mostly on goodwill and one retired schoolteacher's information network. When he finally drives out to introduce himself to the woman at the old Cooper farm, he doesn't find what he expects. She is guarded, self-sufficient, and not looking for anything here.

He can't stop thinking about her anyway.

What follows is an intensely charged slow burn between two people with reasons to be careful. When a Christmas Eve blizzard traps them together on the farm, slow becomes something else entirely. But Molly's secrets didn't stay buried on their own, and whatever is circling the property wants her found. Keeping her heart hidden from Jack may be the least of her problems.

For readers of Nora Roberts, Kristen Ashley, and Denise Grover Swank - a deeply satisfying romance with genuine danger and serious heat.