The Briar Brothers — A 5-Book Small-Town Single-Dad Blue-Collar Romance Series

THE BRIAR BROTHERS

A Small-Town Single-Dad Blue-Collar Romance Series

5 Short Reads • Alternating First Person • HEA per Book + Series Taproom Finale

Five brothers. Five women who walked into the brewery with nowhere left to go. One mountain town that decided to hold them.

The Series

Briar Brothers Brewing Co. sits at the bottom of a mountain in Hawk’s Rest, North Carolina — a brewery the eldest Briar built with his hands the year his wife died, and the four brothers who run it with him. They are brewmasters and distillers, builders and drivers and firefighters, and they have, between them, raised one daughter, taken in one orphaned niece, found a baby on a porch in a carrier, become guardians to a twelve-year-old nephew nobody knew existed, and made the brewery the kind of place a frightened woman with a child can park her car at noon and feel safe inside of an hour.

Five blue-collar brothers in flannel and boots who do not perform romance and do not, generally, talk. Five women who arrived in Hawk’s Rest with nothing and stayed because the brewery made them a family. The voice is obsessive instalove — the hero unhinged about her by chapter three. The prose is short. The kids are real.

The series closes with five couples and six children in the taproom on a Saturday afternoon and a single sentence: we are five brothers, now. We will hold them.

What’s Included in This Package

The Five Books

Book One — The Brewmaster (Mara & Cole)

“She drove four hundred miles to disappear. He had eight hours of brewery work and one daughter and zero plans to fall in love. They had nine days.”

The Brewmaster · Mara & Cole

COLE BRIAR is thirty-six, widowed at twenty-eight, and the brewmaster at Briar Brothers Brewing Co. — the brewery he built with his hands on a mountain road outside Hawk’s Rest in the eighteen months after his wife died. He has a six-year-old daughter named Sadie, four younger brothers who run the brewery beside him, an eighty-thousand-dollar malt-vendor deadline at the end of the month, and exactly no interest in the woman whose Subaru is broken down on the side of his road at four in the afternoon — until he looks at her.

MARA SANDERSON has just put four hundred miles between herself and a man named Daniel Holcomb, who works for his father’s law firm and used to be her husband, and who has, in the last eight months, made it very clear that he is not done with her. She wants a job for nine days while her car gets fixed and then she wants to disappear again. Cole hires her at the brewery for a marketing rebuild that is, by Sunday, real. By Tuesday she is reading bedtime stories to Sadie. By Friday she is in his bed. By the following Wednesday a long white envelope from Holcomb, Maines, and Roe arrives at the brewery on his father’s letterhead, and Mara packs a duffel bag in twenty-eight minutes — and Cole, who has been letting people leave him for nine years, gets in his truck.

Small-town single-dad romance at its most obsessive — instalove, a hero who is feral about her by chapter three, a six-year-old who decides Mara is staying before either of them does, and a brewery whose Oktoberfest weekend determines whether the family business survives the month.

Featured hooks · Widowed Single Dad · Instalove Obsession · Woman on the Run from a Stalker Ex · Found-Family Brewery · 6-Year-Old Who Chooses the Heroine · Marketing Fixer Heroine · Federal-Charge Subplot · Saving-the-Family-Business Deadline

Book Two — The Distiller (June & Tate)

“She baked bread for the brewery kitchen. He found a baby on his porch and learned what a daughter was. They had nine weeks.”

The Distiller · June & Tate

TATE BRIAR is thirty-two, the brewery’s distiller, and the brother who has, his whole life, said he is not the marrying kind. JUNE KESSLER is twenty-nine, the baker who opens the brewery kitchen at five in the morning every day, and who has, in three months, watched Tate cross the lot at five-fifteen for coffee and not, ever, met his eyes. They had decided, separately, that this was a thing they would not be doing. Then, at eleven-fourteen on a Friday night in Oktoberfest, Tate finds a sleeping baby in a carrier on his porch with a one-line note from a woman who is dead by morning, and June is, by sunrise, the only person Tate has called.

The baby’s name is Wren. The woman who left her was Lena — Tate’s college girlfriend who walked out twelve years ago and never came back. Tate is, in the space of nine hours, a father. He is also a man who is, in the kitchen at five in the morning on the eighth day, falling in love with the woman who has been showing up at his loft with bread and a hand on Wren’s back and the steady knowledge that nobody is going to take the baby away from him. Then, at eight-eleven on a Tuesday, Tate finds out from his youngest brother that there is a seven-year-old girl who is also Lena’s, and the brewery becomes a family of seven inside of one week.

Single-dad romance at its most tender — a hero who has never wanted children and who is, by the third week, the kind of father who carries a bassinet across the loading dock so the baby can hear the yeast. A baker-meets-brewer love story with bread on the counter and a stranger’s child in the cradle.

Featured hooks · Baby on the Doorstep · Baker Neighbour + Brewer Hero · Reluctant Fatherhood, Instant Devotion · Slow-Burn Workplace Adjacency · Dead-Mother Backstory (Tenderly) · Sleep-Deprivation Softening · Bread / Brewer Parallel Craft · Family-of-Seven Pivot

Book Three — The Builder (Hannah & Reed)

“He drove to Tennessee to bring home a seven-year-old he had never met. She was the kindergarten teacher who taught his niece her name.”

The Builder · Hannah & Reed

REED BRIAR is thirty, the brewery’s carpenter, and the brother who built every room every Briar woman has ever slept in — including the room he just framed at three in the morning for a seven-year-old girl named Poppy, Lena’s other child, whose mother died in a Tennessee motel two days ago. Reed picked her up from a county office at noon on a Wednesday and drove her, in the cab of his truck, two hundred and forty miles back to Hawk’s Rest. HANNAH WELLS is twenty-eight, the kindergarten teacher at Hawk’s Rest Elementary, and the woman who has, on the third day, sat down on the porch swing beside a small girl who has not, yet, said a word.

Hannah is in the room because Mara called her at six in the morning and asked her, woman to woman, if she would come. Hannah comes. She comes the next morning too. By the second week she is in Reed’s house every afternoon with a stack of picture books and a quiet patience that does not, ever, ask the girl to perform anything. By the third week she is in his bed and is, against the entire premise of her teaching career, dating a man whose niece is in her class. By the fifth week Reed is asking her to move in, and Poppy is asking — at the kitchen table, with the steady careful voice of a seven-year-old who has been learning how to ask for things — Hannah. Are you going to stay.

Single-uncle romance, slow-burn, and the quietest of the five — built on small repeated mornings, picture books as the love language, and the steady act of a man who has, his entire life, made rooms for other people finally building one for himself. It ends at Poppy’s adoption hearing in a courthouse with the family in the gallery.

Featured hooks · Single Uncle Becomes Guardian · Teacher Heroine + Builder Hero · Found-Family Adoption · Grief-Shared Courtship · Slow Burn, Instant Trust · He Builds Her a Room First · Picture Books as the Love Language · Courthouse Adoption Climax

Book Four — The Driver (Sloane & Brock)

“He has been divorced for six years and built a wall around it. She is twenty-four, has a marketing degree, and is in his passenger seat for the next twenty-one days.”

The Driver · Sloane & Brock

BROCK BRIAR is thirty, the brewery’s distribution driver, and a divorced father of an eight-year-old boy named Eli — and he has, for the last six years, run the route at six in the morning and gone home at seven at night and not, in any visible way, dated. Then, on a Wednesday in early June, his ex-wife sends a text that says she is getting married, and Brock breaks his own thumb on the loading dock, and Cole hires a twenty-four-year-old marketing hire named SLOANE HOLLIS and puts her in the passenger seat of Brock’s truck for one hundred and twenty-six hours over the next three weeks.

Sloane is the sheriff’s daughter, a Chapel Hill graduate, and a woman who has, since she was sixteen, been in love with Brock. Brock does not know this. Brock is going to know it by the end of Monday. She is not going to push. She is, on the route, going to do her marketing work and write blurb copy and rebuild the brewery’s wholesale brand and not, generally, look at his hands. Brock is, by Tuesday afternoon at four-thirty, sitting across his eldest brother’s desk asking permission to be in the room with her without doing anything stupid. By Thursday night, in a Days Inn off I-40 outside the gorge with a storm hitting the metal roof, he is going to do something extremely stupid.

The most slow-burn-then-explode of the five — the long careful walk of a man who has spent six years convinced he is bad at this finding out that he is, in fact, very good at this. His father walks Sloane up to the brewery porch with a casserole and the sentence: Brock. This is the one.

Featured hooks · Divorced Single Dad Finally Ready · Sheriff’s Daughter Heroine · Truck-Cab Forced Proximity · He’s-Been-Her-Crush-Since-Sixteen · One-Bed Motel in a Thunderstorm · Ex-Wife Handled with Grace · 8-Year-Old Son Who Notices Everything · Big-Brother Permission Scene

Book Five — The Youngest (Lainey & Jax) · Series Capstone

“He was the family’s baby. She was the woman in the U-Haul with a toddler and a custody order. He had thirty seconds to decide.”

The Youngest · Lainey & Jax

JAX BRIAR is twenty-eight, the youngest of five brothers, and the only Briar who has not, yet, been responsible for a child — until the chief of the Hawk’s Rest fire department calls at nine on a Tuesday in early September to say there is a twelve-year-old boy at the firehouse asking for him by name, with a backpack and a sweatshirt and a story about his mother Lena. Sam is Lena’s third. Sam is Jax’s nephew. Sam is, by nine-thirty, asleep on Jax’s couch. By the morning the Briar brothers are five fathers and one uncle-turned-guardian, and Jax is, in the office at six with a thermos and a yellow legal pad, learning how to write a custody petition.

LAINEY HAYES is twenty-six and pulls into Hawk’s Rest at noon on the third day of October in a U-Haul, with a sleeping two-year-old named Theo in the back seat, three hundred and forty-two dollars in her wallet, a custody order she has memorised, and a brand-new phone with a number her ex-husband does not have. Mara, who knows the kind of woman who arrives in town with that face, hires her at the brewery taproom in the first hour. Jax, who is at the bar nursing a coffee and a custody petition, looks up. He does not, then or after, look away. By the fourth week the sheriff’s office calls with a license-plate match — and her ex is, somewhere on Route 70, headed for Hawk’s Rest.

The longest book and the loudest book — single-uncle guardianship colliding with a woman on the run from a violent ex, a twelve-year-old boy who has never been a brother and a two-year-old who has never been safe, a firehouse rescue and a courtroom in Asheville. The brothers — all five, with all five women, with six children between them — close the series out in the taproom on a Saturday afternoon with a single sentence: we will hold them.

Featured hooks · Youngest Brother Grown Up · Woman on the Run with a Toddler · Protective Single-Uncle Guardian · Restraining Order / Abusive Ex (Steady) · Firefighter Hero Rescue Arc · 12-Year-Old Nephew Adjustment · 2-Year-Old Heart-Stealer · Series-Finale Taproom Gathering

Series Tropes

Series Details

Heat Level

Content Notes

Comp Title Shelf

What You Get

Five reads away from your next binge-launch series. ❤