It Happened One Summer
Piper Bellinger has spent her twenties as a Los Angeles socialite, coasting on beauty, a huge online following, and her stepfather's money. When a party stunt lands her in the tabloids one too many times, he cuts her off and sends her north to run the rundown Washington bar her late father left behind, betting that a season of honest work will teach her who she is without the spotlight.
Westport is cold, damp, and utterly unimpressed by Piper. So is Brendan Taggart, the broad-shouldered fishing-boat captain who becomes her most maddening problem and her most magnetic one. He is quiet where she is dazzling, rooted where she is restless, and certain she will bolt back to California the moment things get hard.
With her steady younger sister Hannah at her side, Piper starts to rebuild the bar and, almost without meaning to, a life. Warm, funny, and unabashedly steamy, It Happened One Summer is a fish-out-of-water romance about grief, reinvention, and the pull between the person you were raised to be and the one you actually want to become.
A Los Angeles socialite cut off by her stepfather and sent to run her late father's bar.
A gruff Westport fishing-boat captain.
Piper's steadier younger sister.
The author drew inspiration for the protagonist from the character Alexis Rose on the television show Schitt's Creek, specifically aiming to place a similar socialite in a fish out of water scenario.
This is the first installment in the Bellinger Sisters series, which follows the stories of two siblings.