At thirty-seven, Valentin Belmonte returned to his mother’s house with his tail between his legs. No surprise there. His life had been a long line of bad choices, failures, and trouble. Also returning home, freshly graduated and on the hunt for a job, was Mina Toussaint, the orphan Val’s mother and stepfather had taken in when he was already grown. She’d been the only person who’d ever really liked him, but he’d screwed that up a long time ago. Mina’s adoptive family had treated her like the perfect princess and little girl they always wanted. Val was the only one who’d ever seen her for who she really was; she’d never wanted to be a princess. But after what happened when she was sixteen, she thought she hated him. Now, six years later, things were different. She wasn’t the child she’d been when she got so angry. The trouble was that Val hadn’t changed. He still saw her. **

Bang! In one short moment, Ani Novak’s life is turned upside down. Her beautiful family is destroyed and she is left completely alone. With an unnamed desire, she seeks out the little sister she had walked away from when she was nineteen. Tori Kane is barely eighteen, jaded, and reluctantly in need of her sister’s help. While Ani is in the position to financially support her sister, the one thing Tori really needs money can’t buy and Ani no longer knows how to give—trust. Neither of them expected paradise, but they want more than the hell their lives have become. There has to be a middle ground between heaven and hell where they can just be.

Since she was a teenager, Taryn Sato skirted the edge of disastrous decisions. When she found herself pregnant after a one night stand with a complete stranger, she knew she was giving her family an opportunity to say “I told you so.” Caleb Ryder was more of a big brother than best friend to Slate McKenzie. When Slate found out he was going to be a father, Caleb promised to be there for him. Though Caleb was the type of man to learn from his mistakes, history threatened to repeat itself in the form of Slate’s baby’s mother, Taryn. A story about finding love when you aren’t looking and finding your place when your family tree is really a forest.