The Wren and the Ash

Fifteen years after she fled Harrow Cove with nothing but a suitcase and a secret, Vivienne Ashworth receives a letter she cannot ignore: her estranged uncle is dead, and she is named in his will. The bus exhales her onto a salt-stung morning in the village she swore she'd never return to, clutching an envelope she barely remembers opening. What she finds at the cliffside estate is worse than she feared , the house is crumbling, the debts are deep, and the will contains a clause no one anticipated. Wren Calloway, a quiet, sharp-tongued stranger who has lived on the property for years tending its overgrown gardens, holds a co-claim that makes him impossible to dismiss. To inherit what is rightfully hers, Vivienne must share the house , and a full season , with a man who looks at her like a trespasser on her own family's land. As the autumn gales strip the cliffs bare and the village's long-buried history rises through old letters and locked rooms, Vivienne and Wren are forced into uneasy, intimate proximity. What neither expects is that the inheritance will demand more than a signature or a handshake. By the time the last leaves fall, one of them will have to choose: walk away with what the dead left behind, or surrender the life they planned for something none of the departed ever got to have.