Take Me Home
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER
Road Trip Rules: No bad music. No detours. No falling in love.
Hazel Elliot never looks back. If a door closes, she burns the whole house down. But when she’s invited to her father's Christmas Eve wedding, she’s forced to return to Lockett Prairie, Texas, for the first time since she fled for college.
Ash Campbell has been in love with Hazel since she dated his best friend in high school. Now, Ash and Hazel’s relationship is limited to playful feuding over the best chair in their favorite coffee shop, but his attraction to the prickly girl from home has only grown stronger.
When Ash’s car breaks down just as family obligations and the holidays pull him home, only one person can get him there on time. But Hazel has a condition: Everything between them must stay the same. And if it doesn’t? She gets the coffee shop. So the frenemies endure bad music, inclement weather, and B&Bs with only one bed—and that’s just the drive across Texas. When they finally arrive, Hazel must face that, in a small town, there’s nowhere to run . . . and maybe, for the first time, she's found a reason to stay.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Debut author Sweeney sparkles in this emotionally nuanced contemporary. After leaving Lockett Prairie, Tex., for college halfway across the state, Hazel Elliot swears she's done with her hometown—and her divorced parents' drama—entirely. But then her always distant, father announces he's getting married again. To make her angsty road trip home even more uncomfortable, Ash Campbell, the guy who'd been her sort-of nemesis in high school, needs a ride back to Lockett Prairie as well. After the antagonistic pair get stranded in a snowstorm, they form a tentative alliance— which quickly turns to love. When they arrive back in Lockett Prairie, Hazel feels like an outsider among her father's fiancée and her young children, who receive all the attention that Hazel never did growing up. Determined to make the best of it, she puts on a brave face. But when family tensions boil over, Hazel runs fast and far. Will Ash be able to catch her? Sweeney skillfully portrays the psyche of a heroine who grew up feeling that no one wanted her and a hero trying to bear all his family's burdens in the face of his father's multiple sclerosis. Add in a fun road trip and some deliciously dirty love scenes, and Sweeney's stirring romance impresses.