Butterfly Bayou

Lila Daley left Dallas because she had to. After the trauma that ended her career in a big-city emergency room, running the small medical clinic in Papillon, Louisiana looks like exactly the quiet life she needs — close to her sister, far from everything else.

Papillon has other ideas. Lila is greeted by an alligator, drawn into the town's ongoing golf-cart hostilities, and adopted by a scruffy dog she never agreed to take. And there is Sheriff Armie LaVigne, a single father with a fondness for routine, who takes one look at the new nurse practitioner and quietly concludes that his routine is over.

Lexi Blake opens the Butterfly Bayou series with a small-town romance that leans into the comedy of a big-city outsider landing in a place that runs on its own logic — and into the slow, stubborn work of two people deciding to trust each other again.