Beckett

*A Secrets & Second Chances Suspense Romance*

She came to Thorn Creek to disappear. He's the one man who won't let her.

Everly Hale doesn't exist anymore — not really. Six months ago she was a forensic accountant with a corner office and a fiancé who ran one of the fastest-growing development firms on the East Coast. Now she's Wren Calder, a woman who bakes bread before dawn and flinches at unfamiliar cars, hiding in a Blue Ridge town small enough that everyone notices a stranger — and safe enough, she hopes, that no one thinks to look. She has a flash drive that could send her former fiancé to prison. She also has a very short list of people left alive who know where it is.

Deputy Beckett Marsh has spent three years holding his family together with duct tape and stubbornness, and he doesn't have room in his life for anything — or anyone — he can't fully account for. He learned that lesson the hard way once already, and Force Recon didn't teach him to survive a woman lying to his face twice. But the new baker at the Thorn Creek Inn flinches like someone who's been hunted, and Beckett has spent a decade learning to read exactly that kind of fear.

When a stranger's car idles too long outside the bakery, and then a man with a photograph of Wren starts asking careful questions around town, Beckett realizes the woman he's falling for isn't hiding from an ex. She's hiding from people who kill quietly and clean up after themselves. Protecting her means breaking every rule he's built his life around — and trusting a woman whose entire name is a lie.

As the danger tightens around Thorn Creek, Beckett and Everly are forced into the kind of proximity that strips away every defense they have left — and into a reckoning with a syndicate that doesn't lose, and doesn't stop. Everly will have to decide whether to keep running or finally fight. Beckett will have to decide if loving her is a risk worth taking with everything, and everyone, he has left to protect.

*Tropes:* Secrets & Hidden Past • Small-Town Protector • Military Hero • Dual POV • Forced Proximity • Enemies-to-Allies Danger