Hearty by Carrie Aarons is now live!
They say you can always go home again, but for August Percy, that didn’t apply even when she had to live there until her eighteenth birthday.
After saying goodbye to a toxic childhood, she never planned to look in the rearview. Until the death of the woman who caused all her trauma forces her back to Hope Crest.
With a mountain of debt and an uncertain future, August at least has a soft place to land when her former employer and surrogate big brother offers her a house that isn’t chock full of nightmares from the past. What she never bargained for, though? The boy-turned-man she’s always crushed hard on from afar accidentally becoming her roommate.
Evan Ashton is the prodigal son who finally came home … even if he didn’t necessarily want to. As the new head chef of his family’s fourth-generation restaurant, he’s trying to build his own legacy in a line full of stubborn men. So when he ends up under the same roof as the closed-off woman the rest of his siblings seem to know so well, Evan attempts to shut down any curiosity since he can’t afford more complications in his life.
Except conversations over late night snacks, having her unexpectedly working in his kitchen, and inevitably bumping into her at every family celebration they’re both invited to only seems to bring him closer to August … until all of that tension bubbles over.
Then danger begins to close in, and it’s not even a thought of putting himself between her and the threat. But secrets beyond either of their control, and opportunities far from Hope Crest, begin to cause cracks.
And when both of them question whether their intense connection can last for longer than right now, it may just be their final undoing.
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Sunny Shelly’s Review: 5 Stars
The Ashton Family series comes to a end with a roommate romance between youngest sibling Evan and August, the former Hope Pizza waitress who went off to college and never planned to return to Hope Crest.
Evan has always had a chip on his shoulder, feeling that he has a lot to prove as not only the baby of the family but as the only one who is following in his dad’s footsteps as a chef. But Evan is a classically trained chef who has worked in some of the best restaurants in the world, and he faces resistance from his dad at every turn as he’s trying to evolve Hope Pizza to keep up with the times. When Auggie went off to college on a scholarship, it was an escape from the trauma she’d endured her entire childhood at the hands of her abusive mother. She never planned to return to Hope Crest, but she’s been forced to come back to town after her mother dies to settle her affairs.
Through a comedy of errors, both August and Evan end up sharing his sister Alana’s old house. She’s always had a crush on him, while Evan resents her in a way because his family thinks so highly of August. He doesn’t quite know what her home life was like the way his parents and Warren and Alana do, so Evan doesn’t quite understand why she’s such a golden child to them. There’s a lot of tension between them — sexual and otherwise — and it was a trip to see how these two go from kinda-enemies to so much more.
What I loved is how a switch flipped for Evan after they finally bang it out — and he was all in way before August was. When her mother’s past comes back to haunt her, Evan steps up for her big time as a protector. And eventually, August begins to trust that she can rely on the Ashton family to be there for in ways that her own flesh and blood never was.
I really enjoyed the journey that these two characters took!
I received an advanced copy and voluntarily left a review.
Meet Carrie Aarons
Author of romance novels such as Fleeting and Love at First Fight, Carrie Aarons writes books that are just as swoon-worthy as they are sarcastic. Her stories are fueled by vanilla lattes, meloncholy music, and copious amounts of candles.
When she isn’t writing, Carrie is busy binging reality TV, having a love/hate relationship with cardio, and trying not to burn dinner. She lives in farm country with her husband, two children and ninety-pound rescue pup.
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Sunny Shelly Reads 