Heatwave

She swore off cake. He swore off everything.

Three months ago, pastry chef Juliet Ashby was the toast of New York. Then she pushed a seven-tier wedding cake onto the groom, who also happened to be her boss and her secret boyfriend, and thirty-one million people watched it go over.

So she runs as far as a one-way ticket will take her: a tin-roofed farmhouse in rural Australia, a job as live-in nanny, and a seven-year-old who wants proof she can do a cartwheel.

Dr. Sam Kellaway doesn't have time for a nanny who's never driven a car, never met a snake, and flinches every time someone reaches for a phone. He runs the only vet clinic in the district, he's been raising Pip alone since her mom left, and the last time he let someone into his house, she walked out of it.

He gives Juliet a month.

Pip gives him a week.

But the summer is long and getting hotter, the house has one bathroom and no air-conditioning, and the man who wanted nothing to do with her keeps waiting up. When Juliet's past follows her to a town of four hundred people with no secrets, Sam has to decide what he's protecting: his daughter's heart, or his own.

Fans of Elsie Silver and Lyla Sage will fall hard for this grumpy-single-dad, fish-out-of-water Aussie small-town romance. Open door, guaranteed HEA. Book 2 of the Wattle Creek Station series; each book stands alone.