Backroads & Bonfires

The Locals 5

By: Haley Rhoades

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Some homecomings arrive as an invitation. Mine came as a phone call I'll never forget.
Mia Jones has spent seven years building a life in Kansas City—the kind with skylines, no strings, and zero interest in the small town she left behind. Then one call from Athens General Hospital ends all of that in an instant. Her sister and brother-in-law are gone, and two one-year-old boys are left with no one in the world but her.
So Mia packs up her apartment, closes the door on the life she built, and drives home to Athens, to raise her nephews on the same rolling farmland she once couldn't wait to escape—starting with her late grandmother's falling-down farmhouse, right next door to the Davis family's five hundred acres.
The Davises don't know how to be neighbors halfway. Within a week they've fixed her porch, stocked her fridge, and folded her and the boys into Sunday dinners like she was always meant to be there. What Mia didn't sign up for is falling for three of men at once.
There's Dutton, the oldest son and the one who runs the farm—steady, guarded, still nursing the scar the last woman who wanted “more” than this rural life. There's Lee, the youngest son, the quiet dreamer with song lyrics in his back pocket and a way of looking at her like she's the verse he can't finish. And there's Scott, the family's best friend since childhood, grease-stained hands and a Viking hairstyle, carrying more of his father's mess than anyone in town knows.
Three men. Two toddlers. One tiny town where everybody has an opinion about the widow's sister and the Davis boys before Mia's even figured out what she wants.
Between bonfires that burn a little too warm and backroads that keep leading her back to the same three men, Mia is about to learn that starting over doesn't mean starting simple, and that home might mean opening her heart wider than she ever planned.
A steamy small-town love triangle for fans of found family, and slow-burn tension that finally catches fire.