Redemption

Detective Jason Hudson has narrowed his life down to two things: his son and his job. Everything else got buried with a marriage that ended in the worst way possible, and he's made peace with the numbness. A string of break-ins across the county has his instincts up—work is the one place he still knows what he's doing. Then Desiree Price comes back to town after sixteen years. His family starts talking about fate, but Jason is convinced she's running an angle on his grandfather.

Desi comes home hoping to reconnect—with the friends who never knew why she vanished, with the family that loved her like their own, and with the boy who held her whole heart before circumstances she never chose put a thousand miles between them. She didn't expect that boy to have turned into a man who looks straight at her and sees a stranger worth suspecting.

The trouble is, Desi has always been able to see straight through Jason, and sixteen years haven't changed that. She knows grief when she's looking at it. She knows the difference between a man who doesn't want her and a man who's terrified of what wanting her would cost.

Saying so out loud is going to cost them both something. But not saying it might end up costing them everything.

Redemption is the eighth book in the Olman County Series, women's fiction novels of small-town romantic suspense.