Harbor lights

Kevin O'Brien is a former army medic and a newly single father, and he is finding the role hard. He moves back to Chesapeake Shores with his toddler son, hoping to settle among relatives he knows he can rely on and to build a life that looks nothing like the one behind him.

Then he meets Shanna Carlyle, who runs a bookshop on Main Street. Kevin did not plan on a risk like her. Shanna sees at once that he is a wounded man, and she has known plenty of men like that. Even so, Kevin and his boy are very hard for her to keep at a distance.

Just as the walls between them start to come down, a person from Shanna's past turns up. The calm both of them worked to win is now under threat, and the two have to decide whether they can trust again.

This is a contemporary small-town romance centred on a family, with a single father at its heart. Kevin belongs to the O'Brien clan, and that family stays close to the story. The tone is warm and emotional, with the tension coming from old hurts rather than from action.