Innocent Hearts

A brief detour to a ranch in the middle of nowhere doesn’t lead to forever, does it?

Olivia Martinez, forced to leave her high-power Manhattan job with no prospects, is at a crossroad. Not only is she a city girl down to the tips of her Jimmy Choos, she wants to stay close to her parents, who depend on her more than they’d like to. Generally not a risk taker, Olivia steps out of her comfort zone when her best friend, Elizabeth Sutton, asks her to temporarily lend a hand at the Red Sky Ranch. After all, what can a few months change, and New York City is just a plane ride—or three—away, right?

Haunted by an hour that changed her life, Riley Mitchell escapes the memories and the guilt by riding motorcycles way too fast, skydiving, and running into burning buildings. She is good-looking, charming, and never wants for female company, as long as no commitment is expected. When Olivia returns to the Red Sky Ranch, Riley’s carefully crafted safe world goes up in flames.

Can they take a risk and cross the fire line to find love?

Tally Dewilde forges her own path when she chooses to go into veterinary medicine and ignores her mother’s desire that she establish a boutique clinic for the pets of the wealthy in Manhattan. When she arrives in upstate rural New York to join Sydney Valentine’s animal  hospital, the break with her old life seems complete on every level. Until an unwelcome reminder of the painful past arrives at her door in the form of Roman Ashcroft. 

Rome Ashcroft was forced to give up her dreams when accused of a crime that cost her everything. She intends to start a new life as a PA at the Rivers community hospital, until a simple act of kindness throws all her plans into question. Her past, it seems, is not so easily forgotten when fate brings her and Tally Dewilde together—along with an attraction neither welcomes.

Dr. Bennett Anderson accepts a short-term contract at a rural medical center to fill the gap year before taking the high-profile job she’d put on hold while chasing a dream that had slipped away. In a deep-rooted community where everyone seems to know everyone else, Ben is an oddity—a stranger just passing through with no plans to build any ties.

Courtney Valentine is looking for a woman exactly like Ben—smart, sexy, and not in the market for anything serious. All she has to do is convince Ben that sex-without-strings is the perfect pathway to pleasure. What could be better?

The last time Brody Clark left the Rivers, she walked away from her life—her foolish dreams, her few friends, and the secrets she'd kept from everyone. For ten years she'd told herself there was nothing in her past she cared about—not the family who'd given her a home or the one girl she never stopped thinking about. But now she’s back as part of the new medevac flight crew, for at least as long as it takes to finally bury her ghosts.

Val Valentine, DVM, planned on a big city boutique vet practice with high profile clients, easy hours, and lucrative profits. All until the man who was more father to her than her own asks for her help, and she ends up back in the backwater where all she has are bad memories.

Brody figures cutting her ties to the past would be a hell of a lot easier if she could only avoid the woman she’s never been able to forget. Since Val never even knew she was alive back in high school, that shouldn’t be too hard now. When their lives collide, both women discover what might have been is closer than they think.

Carrie Longmire loves life with a passion—whether it’s her job as a hospital CEO’s admin, star pitcher for the hospital’s softball team, or her latest romantic possibility, she gives 110 percent and won’t take less from anyone else. Maybe that’s why she’s still single. She’s never met anyone who could convince her they wanted anything more than a fling. Friendly was fun, but not where she wanted to hang her heart.

Gina Antonelli had big dreams once, of riding her athletic achievements all the way to West Point and being the first in a long family line of soldiers to serve as an officer. When that dream died along with the girl she’d planned to marry one day, she’d vowed to forget about happily ever afters. Love hadn’t gotten her anything but a broken heart and a ruined body.

When Gina agrees to renovate Carrie’s soon-to-be new house as a favor to her brother’s boss, she doesn’t welcome Carrie’s overtures at friendship or her own unexpected attraction.

A Rivers Community Romance

Praise from RT Book Reviews: "Love After Hours, the fourth in Radclyffe's Rivers Community series, evokes the sense of a continuing drama as Gina and Carrie's slow-burning romance intertwines with details of other Rivers residents. They become part of a greater picture where friends and family support each other in personal and recreational endeavors. Vivid settings and characters draw in the reader..."

Some people work to pay the bills or send the kids to school or afford playtime. Ex-Army medic physician-assistant Glenn Archer works, as much as she possibly can, to atone for all the lost lives on her conscience. No matter how many patients she helps save at the Rivers Community Hospital, it will never be enough, but it helps her look at herself in the mirror in the morning. Mariana Mateo needs to make a new life, one without the daily reminders of all she’s lost and far away from the suffocating sympathies of her well-meaning family, and moving to a place as different as possible from the bustling LA she grew up in seems like a good idea. A cousin she hasn’t seen in twenty years is the only person who knows her in the tiny upstate New York farming community, and that’s just the way she wants it. When working side by side with Glenn Archer in the ER makes Mari remember what desire feels like, Mari determines to ignore the feelings, which isn’t all that difficult since Glenn is as unapproachable as the beautiful but remote mountains.

A Rivers Community Novel