Our story was classic. A typical fairytale. Two young kids falling in love under an onyx sky. He was my dream...and I naively thought I was his. Until he bartered our love and sold me a lie. Now, I’m returning to the life I once knew as a married woman, wed to the richest man in Nashville.

Davis was five years older than me . . . antisocial and temperamental. And there was the little fact that he didn't know I existed. Still, I gave him my heart, and he crushed it. So I picked up the pieces and ran away to New York City. I had a plan that would keep my heart intact for years. But one phone call changed everything. Returning home meant facing the past . . . and the man who ruined me. I had hoped that the mountain had swallowed him whole.

I shouldn't have been out in that storm. I knew it the second my feet hit the ground, and my flip-flops slid in the mud. Unfortunately, I had no idea what in the world I was doing. Not with my kids, or the three horses in my barn . . . and definitely not in the small country town we'd recently moved to. Being told all these facts, while being reluctantly rescued by my brand-new neighbor didn't help matters either.

Everyone expected me to play hockey. I was good at it, but I was better at being a doctor. So I hung up the skates and joined Doctors Without Borders. But there is no place like home, so now I’m back. And instead of being on the ice, I’m behind the bench as the team physician. After years of playing cat and mouse, it’s time to admit it. She’s mine.

I crafted a perfectly simple life for myself and my son. It was peaceful and lonely, exactly how I wanted it. Then my new neighbor moved in and ruined everything. Archer Green. Not just a member of a motorcycle club but the president. The leather jacket on his broad back, along with all its various patches, might as well have been red flags, warning me to stay away all the while his looks dared me not to. Ignoring him was futile. Still, I tried. Until Archer showed up in my son’s classroom, ready to read for storytime hour.