Second Song

Authors have two favorite words: The End.
Seraphina Sinclair has written sixty-one of them. None of them hers.

Sixty-one romance novels. Sixty-one happily-ever-afters for her characters — and exactly zero for herself.

And she’s been fine, thank you very much. Raising her son in their cliffside home above the Pacific. Keeping her heart safely out of the equation. Letting the fictional men do the falling.

What Seraphina does not know — what she will, in fact, be the last person in Willet Cove to find out — is that her fifteen-year-old son and his friends have quietly written her a dating profile on an app called Second Chance. And that her son has, independently and with the cool competence of someone who was clearly born to run a con, requested guitar lessons from the brooding, beautiful bartender at the local watering hole.

At their house. Every week.
Purely coincidentally.

Hunter Sloan came to Willet Cove to disappear. After a bitter, very public divorce, he walked away from Nashville, took a job pouring drinks at a small-town pub, and told himself a quieter life was what he needed. He was supposed to heal. Write some songs. Figure out what came next.

He wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Seraphina Sinclair the first time she walked into his bar.
But then — he also wasn’t supposed to spend the winter before he met her alone in a cottage by the sea, reading every one of her novels and wondering if the woman who wrote them could ever believe in one of her own.

What Seraphina doesn’t know is that Hunter has heard of her long before she heard of him.

Because her favorite song — the three-chord country ballad that’s been on repeat in her writing studio ever since it first hit the radio, the one that cracked her heart open and found its way into every love story she’s written since — was written by the man now standing in her living room tuning a guitar.

He wrote the song she’s been writing to.
Hunter.

When buried feelings finally surface and the outside world comes crashing in — tabloid lies, a scandal neither of them asked for, and paparazzi who do not care that Tyler is a minor — Seraphina and Hunter will have to decide whether the love they’ve quietly been making of each other for years is strong enough to survive the noise.
Luckily, her son and his band of determined teenage matchmakers have already done the hard part.

They were ninety-nine percent sure about it from the beginning.
Second Song is the fourth book in the Parent App series — a slow-burn, behind-closed-doors small-town romance featuring a guarded single-mom author, a songwriter hero who’s been pouring his heart into her favorite song for years, meddling teenage matchmakers considerably more effective than their mothers suspect, a country-music superstar best friend, and two people who found each other’s art long before they found each other.

Because in Willet Cove, the best love stories aren’t the ones you write.
They’re the ones your kid signs you up for.

Turns out Seraphina’s two favorite words might not be The End after all.
They might just be The Beginning.