CHOSEN LAST (Hartsong #1)

She spent two years being the last thing he ever chose. Then she stopped waiting to be chosen at all.

Beth Thompson built a whole life in Hartsong before Alonzo Vargas ever walked into it—her flower shop, her name, her place in a town that loves her. She thought she was building forever, too.

She just kept noticing things.

The way his family’s table always had room for Lola—his "old friend from way back"—and never quite enough room for her.

The dropped plans. The dinner he walked out on for an emergency that turned out to be a lie.

And every single time Beth admitted something felt wrong, the people she loved most looked her in the eye and told her the same thing: she was jealous. Paranoid. Imagining it.

She wasn’t imagining a thing.

The night she finally hears the truth in his own words—who Lola really is, what he hid for years, what an entire family let her be blamed for—Beth doesn’t fall apart.

She sets the ring on the counter, drives home to her own people, and starts becoming herself again, one brick at a time, with no help at all from the man who broke her.

Alonzo knows there’s no version of this where he isn’t the villain.

He doesn’t get to explain his way back in.

If he wants any chance at the only thing he was ever handed and threw away, he has to do the one thing he never managed when she was his: put her first.

Not with a grand gesture. On the ordinary, unglamorous, nobody-is-watching days. Every single one.

Some people spend their whole lives waiting to be chosen. Some finally decide to do the choosing themselves. And some—the ones who lied, and smiled, and let a good woman take the fall—get exactly what they’ve earned.

Chosen Last is a slow-burn, angst-soaked, dual-POV grovel romance about betrayal, intuition, and the brutal difference between being sorry and becoming someone worth forgiving.

A gaslit heroine who stops doubting herself.

A morally grey hero who has to pay for it in full.

And a happily-ever-after that is earned, not given.

The HEA is guaranteed. The journey is not.

Some promises are made to break. Some hearts are chosen last.