Unashamed: A Sweet Contemporary Christian Romance (The Unscripted Series Book 4)

She made everyone else visible. He was the first to see her.

Zuri Aneke has spent fifteen years making other people look extraordinary. As one of Hollywood’s most sought-after costume designers, she knows how to use fabric, thread, and instinct to tell anyone’s story — except her own.

When a prestigious fashion collective offers her a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — a capsule collection debuting at D.C.’s fall fashion week, with full access to the Smithsonian’s costume archive — Zuri says yes. Even though it means spending four months in the one city she’s avoided for fifteen years. The city where her father lives. The father who left when she was twelve and never came back.

At the Smithsonian, she meets Nolan Rhodes. Quiet where she is loud. Still where she is motion. A curator who studies garments the way she studies people — completely, without rushing, as if the looking itself is an act of devotion. He brings her coffee at ten-thirty and doesn’t stay. He sits on the floor beside her at midnight and doesn’t speak. He sees the woman underneath the armor — and he waits.

As Zuri interviews real women for a collection called Seen, she begins to unravel. A diplomat’s wife who dressed invisible for forty years. A veteran who can’t get dressed without her uniform. A teenager in foster care who builds her identity for eleven dollars at a thrift store. Their stories crack something open in Zuri — the locked room where she keeps her feelings about her father, about God, about the twelve-year-old girl still standing in a doorway watching taillights disappear.

And when a rainy Wednesday leads her through the open door of a small D.C. church, Zuri discovers that the God she walked away from at fourteen has been watching the road. Waiting. Running.

Unashamed is a story about the courage it takes to stop performing and start being seen — by the people who love you, by a quiet man in a blazer, and by a God whose patience outlasts every wall you build.

The Unscripted Series: Book 1: Unbroken (Hadley & Ethan — Vermont)
Book 2: Unrehearsed (Viv & Sandro — Lake Como)
Book 3: Unforgotten (Sera & Quinn — Atlanta)
Book 4: Unashamed (Zuri & Nolan — Washington, D.C.)
Book 5: Unending (Joint Wedding — Lake Como)

Hollywood made them stars. God made them something better.