Stop Running: A Small Town Christian Romance (One Year to Change Everything Book 5)

She has spent her whole life leaving before anyone can leave her. He is the first man who doesn’t chase.

Natalie Pierce knows how to start over. She’s done it in more towns than she’ll admit — always leaving before a place becomes home, before staying has a chance to hurt. So when she arrives in Cedarton, Tennessee, she gives the town a year and keeps her life packed in boxes.

Then she walks into Hart Woodworks.

Owen Hart builds furniture the old-fashioned way, one careful piece at a time, and he’s in no hurry about anything — not the family business he’s trying to save, not his grandfather’s fading memory, and certainly not the sharp-tongued bookkeeper who arrives determined to fix his books by Friday.

Natalie is exactly the help he needs. She’s also exactly the kind of woman he knows better than to want.

As a once-in-a-lifetime commission pulls them into each other’s days, Cedarton starts doing something Natalie never allowed anywhere else. It starts feeling like home.

Then the past catches up with her — and offers her the one thing she’s never been able to refuse. A way out.

Stop Running is a heartfelt Christian small-town romance about healing, faith, family, grief, second chances, and learning that love isn’t something you have to outrun. With a steady carpenter, a fiercely independent heroine, a beloved grandfather, a struggling family business, and a Tennessee town that has a way of making strangers feel like family, this is a story about putting down roots, opening your hands, and discovering that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is stay.

Stop Running is Book Five in the One Year to Change Everything series, a collection of uplifting Christian romances about ordinary people whose lives are transformed when they finally take the brave step that changes everything. Each book stands alone with its own complete romance and happily-ever-after.