What if love can transcend time and death?
When I was three years old, I started drawing a house with a red door. Next to the house I drew a happy family—a husband, a wife, a baby, and their dog. For years I cried every night, clutching the drawings, begging my mother to take me home to my real family.
I was labeled odd—a talented child with an overactive imagination.
But one day I wandered straight to that house with the red door, and I found the man and the dog I had been drawing.
Alex Fox was quiet. A sexy, brooding artist. A recluse hiding behind an eye patch and shaggy hair. A grieving widower, suspended in time, never moving forward. Waiting for his love to return.
As I grew up we developed an unlikely but easy friendship, bonding over our mutual love of art. He felt familiar, his home felt like home. But as the years passed I found it harder and harder to ignore not only my growing feelings for him, but the odd visions that played through my mind every time I got too close to him, or spent time in his house.
Or more accurately, when I touched his late wife’s things. Like her wedding gown. And her husband’s lips.
Dreams, reality, and sanity began to blur until I came to a startling revelation. I wasn’t having visions, and I wasn’t delusional. I was having memories. Alex’s late wife’s memories, to be exact.
Alex fights our undeniable connection, believing I’m off limits and too young for him. He tries desperately to do what’s right—pushing away the one and only thing he’s been wishing for since that tragic day when he lost everything. Or so he thinks.
He was mine, once upon a time, in a prior life.
And I’m going to make him mine again.
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Available in KU
Sunny Shelly’s Review: 5 Stars
The Lovely Return is the kind of gripping emotional story that will stay with you long after that beautiful epilogue. The story of Alex Fox and Penny Rose is unconventional, but so hauntingly beautiful. There were so many twists and turns in the story, and Carian Cole did a brilliant job of crafting this epic, heartbreaking romance.
As the story unfolds over 20+ years, these characters go through so much on their way to their happily ever after. The day that his wife went into labor was a life-changing moment for Alex Fox, but not in the way he expected it to be. He was consumed by grief and depression, and lived in the shadows until a little girl named Penny Rose entered his life six years later. The connection between them was clear from the start, and a lovely friendship grew between the artist and his student, even though they both felt that their relationship had a more profound meaning.
There are so many ups and downs in Alex and Penny’s story. On top of the forbidden romance between these two characters, Carian Cole explores grief, forgiveness, recovery, mental health, and reincarnation in telling this lovely tale of a lovely return.
This story is one that will stick with me for a long, long, time, and I’m sure it will have a spot on my “reread often” shelf.
I received an advanced copy and voluntarily left a review.
Meet Carian Cole:
I have a passion for the bad boys–those covered in tattoos, sexy smirks, ripped jeans, fast cars, motorcycles and of course, the sweet girls who try to tame them and win their hearts.
Born and raised a Jersey girl, I now reside in the mountains of beautiful New Hampshire with my husband and our multitude of furry pets. I spend most of my time writing, reading, and vacuuming.
I started to read at a very young age and began to write as soon as I could hold a crayon and put sentences together. My mom saved most of my writings, and I have them now. Of course back then, my stories were about cute puppies chasing butterflies. Now they’re about hot guys chasing after pretty girls.
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