What the Highlands Kept
Julian Ashworth-Hale has spent his entire life being groomed to inherit Hale Hospitality Group, the luxury hotel empire his grandfather built from nothing. When Edmund Hale sets his sights on the last stretch of untouched coastline in Scotland, the village of Ardmuir, he sends Julian to secure it quietly, before anyone realizes a Hale is involved. Ardmuir has been burned by developers before, and its people no longer sell to outsiders. So Julian arrives not as an heir, but as Jules Ashford, a carpenter looking for quiet work and a place to disappear for a season.
He finds both in Isla MacRae.
Isla runs the Selkie's Rest, the boatyard and guesthouse her father left her, and she has spent five years holding Ardmuir together with stubbornness, salt water, and a wariness toward strangers that she wears like armor. She was seventeen when the last company came promising jobs and left her family with nothing but debt and a dead father. She does not trust smooth hands or easy smiles, and Jules Ashford has both, but he also has calluses forming where none were before, a genuine ache to be useful, and a way of looking at her like she is the first real thing he has encountered in years.
As the village lets him in, Julian finds himself falling for the woman he was sent to deceive, and for a version of himself that never had to perform. But Edmund Hale's patience is not infinite, London has not forgotten its heir is missing, and Ardmuir keeps its own kind of watch. The truth is coming for Julian long before he is ready to tell it, and when it arrives, it will not ask his permission.
This is the beginning of a longer story. These first ten chapters lay the foundation; many more will follow.