The last thing she can fix is her own life. Until one man’s offer changes everything.

There’s been one constant in Belle Boots’ nomadic life. Horses. She’s lived in Roses, North Carolina, for a couple years, but lately the universe seems to be telling her it’s time to pack up her equine therapy practice and move on. Maybe Florida. Or California.

But when she’s offered a horse-friendly fixer-upper near where she grew up, her usual sense of adventure gives way to a longing for something familiar. Salt air, wheeling seagulls, summer sand between her toes. Wilmington. Home.

The universe, with its brilliant sense of timing, chooses that moment to muddy up her plans with a man whose emerald-green eyes and rich Scottish accent do funny things to her pulse.

Andrew Branfield knows what it’s like to have important things slip through his fingers. A marriage. Money. Though Belle’s teasing voice and smoky gray eyes stir the ashes of his loneliness, his first priority is doing whatever’s necessary to keep his daughter’s favorite equine therapist from drifting away.

He never expected when he set out to build Belle the barn of her dreams that he’d be building something else: a home for their hearts.

Sometimes you have to leave a place to discover it’s really your home.