Hearts Restored

Some buildings hold stories. This one holds two generations of love — and it’s about to hold one more.

Sarah Hartwell built her construction company from the ground up — no degree, no business partner, no shortcuts. At thirty, she’s the most respected builder in Serenity Crossing, Tennessee, and she’s earned every ounce of that reputation with her own two hands. But the last man she let past her carefully constructed walls told her she was too much — too driven, too strong, too her — and that lesson sank deep. Now Sarah pours everything into her work and tells herself the ache she carries is just the cost of being good at what she does. When a historic theater restoration lands on her desk, she takes the job for the building, not the architect. She barely remembers Ethan Cole as anything more than the golden boy she couldn’t stand in high school. She certainly doesn’t expect him to walk back into her life and rearrange everything she thought she had under control.

Ethan Cole left Serenity Crossing at eighteen with his eyes on a bigger horizon and never looked back — until a phone call at dawn changed everything. His father’s sudden death brought him home to take over the family architecture firm, care for his grieving mother, and face the unsettling truth that the successful life he built in Nashville left him hollow in all the places that matter. The Granville Theater was his grandparents’ and his parents’ love story, his childhood second home, and his father’s unfinished dream. Restoring it is the only language Ethan has left to say what he never told his father while he was alive. But grief isn’t the only thing Ethan carried home. He also brought the hard lesson of a relationship he lost because he buried love under blueprints and chose work over his relationship every single time. Now the stubborn, brilliant contractor he can’t stop thinking about is making him believe in love again.

Forced into professional partnership on the most personal project of their lives, Ethan and Sarah discover that the charged rivalry they remember from high school has become something far more meaningful — mutual respect, unexpected laughter, and the slow realization that the person standing beside them sees past every wall they’ve built. But Ethan’s mother clings to the theater as the last piece of her husband she can hold, every proposed change reopening a wound that hasn’t begun to heal. And when a crisis forces Ethan to choose between the woman he loves and the mother who needs him, he falls back on the one instinct that has already cost him everything: carrying it alone.

In a small town named Serenity Crossing, two people who’ve spent their lives building things for everyone else must decide whether they’re brave enough to build something together — and whether the God who restores broken places might have plans for their stubborn, guarded, aching hearts, too.

Tropes:

• Rivals to lovers
• Forced proximity
• He falls first
• Small-town romance
• Wounded hero / wounded heroine
• Found family

Reader Promise: Hearts Restored is a sweet, clean Christian contemporary romance with crackling chemistry, a swoon-worthy hero who falls first and falls hard, a heroine you’ll want to cheer for, a faith journey woven gently into every page, and the emotionally satisfying happily ever after your heart is hoping for.