Reckon
Description
Wren Calloway was Cole Holt's wife for six years. For one of them she watched him die. For eleven months and three days she has not picked up a brush.
Wade Calloway was Cole's foreman, his oldest friend and the man who held his hand on the last morning. He counts in pencil. He sleeps in a cabin behind the barn. He has not let himself look at his best friend's widow in eleven months.
Cole left them a yellow envelope each.
Inside Wren's is the studio key, the receipts she did not know Cole had kept and one line in her husband's handwriting. Open them together.
Inside Wade's is the deed to the south pasture, a sealed copy of the ranch's books and one line. She paints in chaos. You count in pencil. I always thought you would balance each other out. Take care of her if I am not the one who is doing it. Make her pick up the brush. Make her laugh first. The rest will follow.
They have thirty days.
By the fourteenth he is sleeping on the studio floor. By the twenty-first she is painting again. By the twenty-eighth she kisses the man her dying husband chose for her and does not, in the kissing, feel like she is betraying anyone.
Some men keep your brother's secrets. Some men keep you.
More details
Person
Scarlett Vale writes dark contemporary romance for women who crave obsession, danger plus devastating love. Her debut series The Marchetti Dynasty pairs the elegance of Penelope Douglas with the cinematic intensity of Ana Huang. She lives in Amsterdam with one black cat plus a small careful collection of vintage fountain pens. When she is not writing she is reading every BookTok dark romance she can find, drinking espresso the way her late grandmother taught her in 2007, plus listening to old Sicilian music on Sundays at noon. Cruel Vow is the first book in a four book series. Cruel King follows in 2027.
