Pretty Little Scars

SOME SCARS YOU CAN SEE. MOST YOU CAN'T.

In a one-stoplight town in the Blue Ridge foothills, nurse practitioner Wren Calloway has built a life with no soft places to land. She runs Cedar Hollow's family clinic on devotion and unpaid overtime, drives nine miles up gravel roads to sit with the dying, and wears long sleeves in July so no one sees the burns she's carried since the night she went back into a fire for the mother she couldn't save. She doesn't let people in. She calls it kindness. It's a fortress.

Then Dr. Caleb Mercer buys the practice - the one she always assumed would be hers.

Caleb came up the mountain to disappear. A widower with an easy smile and a grief he can't unpack, he wanted a quiet place to stop feeling. He didn't expect Wren: prickly, brilliant, and braver than anyone he's ever met. He didn't expect a woman who runs into every fire but her own. And he didn't expect to want, for the first time since he lost his wife, to stay.

What starts as a turf war becomes a partnership. What starts as a partnership becomes the kind of love that asks for everything - your secrets, your scars, the last locked room inside you. Slowly, in lamplight and crisis and the small holy ordinariness of two people learning each other, the walls start to come down.

But a corporate hospital network is circling Cedar Hollow, and the only way to save the clinic is to fight for it together - out loud, with nothing hidden. For two people who've made an art of deciding alone "to protect" each other, that may be the one thing they can't do. One wrong move could cost them the clinic, the town, and the first real love either of them has ever let all the way in.

To keep it all, Wren and Caleb will have to learn what a dying man once told them: that the fear is the price, and not the reason - and that you waste the whole thing waiting. Because some scars aren't the end of the story. They're proof you survived long enough to be loved - and that the people who stay are the ones who reach for the scar instead of looking away.

PRETTY LITTLE SCARS is an emotional, slow-burn small-town romance about grief, healing, found family, and the terrifying courage it takes to let someone all the way in. Told in alternating points of view, it's tender and sensual without tipping into the explicit - a deeply felt, ugly-cry-in-the-best-way love story with a guaranteed happily ever after.

Readers will fall for:

• A small-town clinic and the fiercely loyal community that fights to save it
• A guarded, scarred heroine who rescues everyone but herself
• A grieving, golden-hearted hero who finally chooses to stay
• Forced proximity, partners-to-lovers, and a slow burn that earns every spark
• A hero who sees the heroine's worst scar and calls it the bravest part of her
• Found family, meddling friends, and a town with one stoplight and a thousand opinions
• Grief, body image, and healing handled with honesty and real hope
• Sensual, emotional heat and a swoony, hard-won happily ever after

Tropes & themes: small-town romance, workplace romance, slow burn, forced proximity, partners-to-lovers, found family, widower hero, scarred heroine, grief and healing, opposites attract, second chance at love, medical romance, dual POV, emotional women's fiction, happily ever after.

Perfect for readers who love the heart of Virgin River, the small-town warmth of Robyn Carr and RaeAnne Thayne, and emotional, character-driven contemporary romance about second chances, broken people, and the towns that hold them together.