Emmy Farrow left Cranberry Cove at eighteen and never planned to come back. Fourteen years and one burned-out hospitality career later, a phone call brings her home to the little Maine harbor town she grew up in: her grandmother has taken a fall, and the rambling old inn Nan has poured forty years of her life into is falling down around her.
The plan is simple. Get the Cranberry Inn patched up and profitable, or get it sold, and be back in Boston by fall with her tidy, portable, carefully rootless life intact.
The plan does not survive contact with Ben Tolliver.
Ben builds boats, keeps to himself, and has exactly zero patience for a woman who already has one foot out the door. He agreed to fix the inn's roof as a favor to Nan, not to spend his summer arguing with her sharp-tongued granddaughter over spreadsheets and shingles. He's a widower with an eight-year-old daughter and a heart he closed for repairs four years ago, and he is not looking to open it for someone who's leaving.
But the roof needs more than money can fix, a slick out-of-town developer is circling the whole waterfront, and Ben's daughter Pip, who reads the tide pools like scripture and doesn't warm to just anyone, has decided Emmy is worth keeping. Between paint fumes and low tide and a town that stubbornly refuses to let her stay a stranger, Emmy finds herself falling for exactly the life she spent fourteen years running from.
When the job she always wanted finally calls, Emmy has to decide what home actually is, and whether the bravest thing a person can do is stop running and stay.
The Inn at Cranberry Cove is the first book in Cranberry Cove, a warm, small-town coastal romance series full of found family, second chances, and a town worth fighting for. Grumpy-sunshine slow burn, a swoony single dad, a scene-stealing kid, and a happily-ever-after you'll want to move to Maine for. Closed-door / behind-the-door heat, book-club clean.