Against the Storm

Audrey Wagner has spent her entire life being the dependable one. The daughter who pays the bills. The sister who fixes everyone’s messes. The bookkeeper whose bank account has somehow turned into her family’s emergency fund. So when her beloved Aunt Abbey has a heart attack, Audrey does what she always does: uses all three weeks of vacation to leave her boring bank job in Queens and head to tiny Gracemont to help run Abbey’s bar.

Three weeks. That’s the plan. Because Audrey is a city girl, and Gracemont has approximately twelve seconds of excitement between sunrise and sunset. She certainly isn’t looking for a man—or a reason to stay.

Then she meets Sam Storm. The town’s sexy mayor is a master brewer, a hard worker, and the kind of man who knows exactly what he wants. And what Sam wants is Audrey. He falls fast, but Audrey isn’t interested in forever. She has a family back in New York who needs her, and a life she’s supposed to return to.

So they make a deal: friends with benefits. No promises. No expectations. No happily-ever-after. While Sam agrees, he leaves out the part where he has absolutely no intention of letting Audrey go.

As Sam shows Audrey what she’s been missing, she begins to question everything she thought she wanted. Because somewhere between late nights at the bar, stolen moments with Sam, and a town that slowly starts to feel like home, Audrey discovers something she never expected:

Maybe the life she’s running back to isn’t the life she actually wants.