Somewhere Between Hate And Now

Somewhere Between Hate and Now
The Crestfall Series — Book One

She came to Crestfall to disappear. She didn't plan on him.

Sloane Mercer had six hundred thousand followers, a thriving brand, and a life that looked perfect from the outside. Then it collapsed — publicly, catastrophically, completely. Now she's driving four hours from Ann Arbor with four bags, one dying succulent, and a new name, looking for the one thing the internet can't give her: somewhere quiet to stop existing for a while.

She doesn't make it three minutes into town before her tire gives out.

Cole Hartley changes it in the rain without being asked, leads her through the dark to her rental, and is deeply, immediately suspicious of her — because the rental is above his brewery, and Cole has spent thirty years building something real in a town that matters to him. The last thing he needs is a woman who made a career out of performing her life deciding to perform it in his building.

Except Sloane isn't performing anymore. She's not sure she remembers how.

What follows is not a love story that happens quickly. It's slow and honest and inconvenient — built in barn dances and late nights at the bar and a notebook left on a window seat and the sound of guitar through old oak floors. Cole is not a man who says things he doesn't mean, which means he says very little. Sloane is a woman who has said too much for too long, and is learning, in Crestfall, what it sounds like when she tells the truth.

They are not easy together. They are not supposed to be. That's what makes it work.

Somewhere Between Hate and Now is a slow-burn contemporary romance about a woman reinventing herself in a place that doesn't care who she used to be, and the man who sees her clearly from the very first night — and decides, slowly, stubbornly, to keep looking.

For readers who like their banter sharp, their tension slow, and their happily-ever-afters earned.

Book One of the Crestfall Series.