After numbing pain for the past five years with boys, alcohol, and all-around apathy*, Rowen Sterling finds herself on a Greyhound bus to nowhere Montana the summer after she graduates high school. Her mom agreed to front the bill to Sterling’s dream art school only if Sterling proves she can work hard and stay out of trouble at Willow Springs Ranch.

    Cooking breakfast at the crack of dawn for a couple dozen ranch hands and mucking* out horse stalls are the last things in the world Sterling wants to spend her summer doing. Until Jesse Walker saunters into her life wearing a pair of painted-on jeans, a cowboy hat, and a grin that makes something in her chest she’d thought was frozen go boom-boom. Walker’s like no one else, and certainly nothing like her. He’s the bright and shiny to her dark and jaded*. Sterling knows there’s no happily-ever-after for the golden boy and the rebel girl — happily-right-now is a stretch* — so she tries to forget and ignore the boy who makes her feel things she’s not sure she’s ready to feel.

    But the more she pushes him away, the closer he seems to get. The more she tells herself she doesn’t care, the harder she falls. When her dark secrets refuse to stay locked behind the walls she’s kept up for years, Sterling realizes it’s not just everyone else she needs to be honest with. It’s herself.

    Nicole Williams is the New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of the “Crash” series, the “Lost and Found” series, and a good handful more. She writes romance because she still believes in soul mates and happy endings. The book is available at online bookstores such as amazon.cn.(SD-Agencies)