As Lottie is starting to wonder if she is in a fairytale, complete with its very own castle, real life throws in a spanner and she finds herself wondering how things always seem to get a little bit complicated just to keep her on her toes.

Immerse yourself back into the next part of this cosy little town by the sea, guaranteed to brighten your day and leave you pondering a new life on the coast.

A warm, uplifting tale you’ll want to snuggle up with and get lost in the wonderful world of Pretty Beach.

 ‘The must-read novel for this summer. If you love contemporary romance books with strong female characters, it's a gem.’

Chapter 1

With her hands around a cup of strong coffee, Lottie walked into the sitting room and looked around. Everything was cosy and in place just as she liked it. The oversized coffee table with its piles of neatly-stacked, colour-coordinated books, the tray with layers of huge white block candles, the little side tables with their gorgeous fabric-covered lamps, and the vast footed glass vase crammed with white shells collected from the beach. Her home and she loved it. 

As Lottie sat down on one of the huge down-filled creamy-white, oversized sofas and sank back into the cushions, she sipped contentedly on her coffee. The little nick on the side of the coffee table caught her eye and she smiled to herself. George had knocked into it with a toy train when he was a toddler and screamed when it had hurt his finger. All the memories, everywhere she looked.

Lottie’s eyes wandered to the enormous antique mirror over the fireplace she’d squeezed into the back of the car after she’d found it in a junk shop when she and Charlie were on holiday in Wales. She smiled at the memory of the long journey home squashed up next to the mirror.

Her eyes settled on the group of large white lanterns either side of the hearth and the one with the tiny, fine, hairline crack down the side from when Toby had gone flying across the timber floor in slippery socks, and ended up with stitches in his head after he had crashed into the fireplace and the lanterns. 

Everything in the large, old, tumbledown house was loved and worn and surrounded by memories and thoughts and love. All from a life built around bringing up her boys and their tight little unit together on Strawberry Hill. A little unit that had ebbed and flowed, loved and lost, and now was about to grow and change and bring all of them into a whole new world. 

As Lottie sat there on the plush sofa, her mind wandering in and out, everything whispered to her about how her life was now, how it had been before, and how it was going to shift and change now that she was pregnant. 

Even the furniture was filled with reminiscing. The beautiful tufted linen ottoman butted up next to the coffee table she’d bought in a dreamy interiors shop in Paris when first married to Charlie. 

The wingback chair she’d found down in the Old Town when she was pregnant with Will and had dragged up the hill in the rain. She smiled at the memory: Charlie had opened the door to a sopping wet, heavily pregnant Lottie and the soggy chair. He’d been ludicrously cross that she’d dragged it along on her own and then laughed as she’d proceeded to strip off her wet clothes in the hallway, run upstairs to her bedroom, and had come back down with her hairdryer and sat in the hallway in her underwear and huge pregnant stomach blowing the chair until it had dried.  

And now here she was ready to create new memories all over again and with what almost felt like a new start. A new life with another man. A new baby on the way. And with a castle in the wings. 

How strange life is with its twists and turns. Its secret shimmering gold.

Lottie smiled as she sipped on her coffee. It was amazing what had happened since she’d set eyes on Connor Bally outside Strawberry Hill House not that long ago, and she’d walked back up the hill in a daze, wondering what quite had happened, what was going on. 

Since that day, her life had become a whirlwind of romance and business and cooking and even though it all sounded a bit soppy, it was very much filled with love. Something that had been missing from her life for ten long, hard years and now, bang, it was back.  

Connor had brought gold and life and love into her world, and Lottie adored how that made her feel. 

Looking around the sitting room musing her life up until now and then thinking about what was to come, Lottie wondered how everything was going to go and hoped that it would all turn out for the best.