Different Roads

He's everything she despises, and she wants him more than anything. When she finally stops fighting her attraction to him, God help anyone who gets caught in the crossfire.

An edgy, emotion-packed novel written for first loves who get lost, hearts that call to each other, and the roads that lead us to the ones for whom we are meant. From the author of the True Blue Trilogy and the Unfinished Series.

"Rarely does a character in a book jump into my heart from the first page. Jaycee Stevens is one of those rare characters. She grabbed me from the first paragraph and hasn't let go since. Ms. Scarbrough has a writing style that draws the reader in quickly and keeps the interest until the very end. Not one to read many romances, I was a bit skeptical at first. This is no ordinary mushy romance novel, however. The relationship between the two main characters is passionate and fraught with more twists and turns than a Cat 5 hurricane." — Joyce Anthony, author of Storm.

When Jaycee Stevens is six years old, her mother dies and leaves her with an abusive drunk of a father who only remembers she’s there when she gets in trouble. She grows up a foul-mouthed hellion who doesn’t take anything off anybody, but she lives in fear of anyone finding out she's also a love-starved little girl terrified of the dark. When she finally manages to escape her father by winning a softball scholarship, she's tripped up in college by a poor little rich boy on the baseball team named Bud Stanton who hides from his own demons in a bottle of whiskey, just like Jaycee's old man. The last thing she wants is to get mixed up with another drunk, but there's no fighting the attraction between the asshole with the angelic smile and the hellion with the heavenly body.

Jaycee and Bud are an emotional paradox: drawn to each other because they're so much alike, and constantly at war for the same reason. They fight as frequently and as physically as they make love, but Bud's arms are the only place Jaycee has ever felt safe from the terror of her recurring nightmares. Their rollercoaster life is gritty, touching, and funny, and just when they think they've made it safely to the end of their wild ride, Jaycee's childhood comes back to derail her when she has to go home and face her biggest fear: What happened to her in the dark?

JOYCE SCARBROUGH is a Southern woman weary of seeing herself and her peers portrayed in books and movies as either post-antebellum debutantes or barefoot hillbillies á la Daisy Duke, so all her heroines are smart, unpretentious women who refuse to be anyone but themselves. Joyce has five published novels as well as several short stories available as digital downloads. She writes both adult and YA fiction. Joyce has lived all her life in beautiful LA (lower Alabama), she's the mother of three gifted children and a blind Pomeranian named Tilly, and she's been married for 32 years to the love of her life-a superhero who disguises himself during the day as a high school math teacher and coach.