The Bailiff at Helmsdale

She built a life she didn't need anyone to complete. He came north to prove he could finally stay somewhere. Neither expected the other to matter this much.

Kirsty Sutherland has spent six years doing things the hard way and doing them well: raising her daughter Ellie alone, holding down a job in the hotel kitchen, and making sure nobody in Helmsdale ever has cause to feel sorry for her. She stopped waiting for anyone to stay a long time ago.

Ross Fraser has just landed his first head bailiff's post on the River Helmsdale, and he's determined not to become the estate's next cautionary tale. Three years, he tells himself. Do the job properly, keep his head down, give the older keepers and the factor no reason to doubt him. Getting involved with the head keeper's daughter was never part of the plan.

But Helmsdale is a small place, and it has a way of putting two careful people in each other's path, at the school gate, on the harbour wall on quiet Sunday afternoons, in the middle of a river in full flood. What starts as feeding ducks and sharing a flask of tea becomes something neither of them can explain away as simply being neighbourly. And Ellie, five years old and entirely unbothered by adult caution, decides rather early on that she approves.

Then a moment of panic threatens to prove Kirsty right about everything she'd been afraid of, and Ross discovers that staying somewhere and staying for someone are two very different kinds of brave.

A tender, small-town Highland romance about second chances, found family, and choosing to stay, one ordinary Tuesday at a time.

The Bailiff at Helmsdale is Book Four in the Northern Lights Romance series and reads as a standalone with a guaranteed happily ever after.