Picture Perfect: A Spicy Small Town Romance

by Clove Winters

An Irish mountain cabin. A luxury retreat scam. And the one man who wasn't supposed to let her in.

Zara Ashworth-Adeniyi is an international model with a broken spirit and a suitcase full of designer clothes she doesn't need. When her luxury wellness retreat turns out to be a fraud, she’s left stranded in the wilds of Ireland. Her only hope is a remote cabin owned by a man who clearly wants to be left alone.

Conor O’Neill is a reclusive wildlife photographer nursing wounds that haven't quite healed. He doesn't have room for a glamorous stranger, but he can't leave her to the Irish rain. The plan was Conor takes the sofa bed, and they stay out of each other's way.

The problem? The old sofa bed is as broken as their hearts. When the springs give way, the cabin suddenly feels much smaller. Forced into close quarters, it sparks a fire neither can put out. But Zara’s high-profile London life is only a headline away. When the paparazzi track her down, Conor retreats behind his walls, convinced their worlds can never truly mesh. Now, Zara must decide if she’s willing to trade the runway for the mountains, and Conor has to decide if he’s brave enough to risk his heart one more time.


✓ Forced Proximity
✓ Grumpy x Sunshine
✓ Small Town Ireland
✓ Fish Out of Water
✓ Stranded Together
✓ Heal-Together Romance
✓ Only One Bed

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Heat Spicy (Explicit open door)
Emotional, steamy, atmospheric, and healing
Wicklow Mountains, Ireland (Rural/Remote)
Trope Reclusive Hero, Famous Heroine, Forced Proximity
Standalone HEA (Happily Ever After)
Written in British English with Irish colloquialisms
Perfect for fans Emily Henry, Talia Hibbert, and Ali Hazelwood

Escape to the Irish wilderness and find out if two broken souls can build a home together.

208 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 26, 2025

Reviews

[CLorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picture Perfect by Clove Winters is a very cute, low angst proximity romance between two people with vastly different backgrounds but with similar broken places. Zara Ashworth-Adeniyi is a bona fide super model of Nigerian descent; she has carefully navigated her two cultures and her high-pressured career. Unfortunately, she has come to a point where she is totally consumed by the artificiality of her job. Her solution? Book a retreat in remote Ireland; the only problem is that the wellness retreat is a scam. Stranded in picturesque Ireland, Zara must depend on the kindness of strangers. Enter Conor O'Neill. Conor is a+ gifted wildlife photographer, still healing from the brutal betrayal handed to him by his big-city girl ex-wife. What could he possibly have in common with Zara? If anything, she is even more out of his league than his faithless wife, and even less likely to want to stay. However, the heart wants what it wants, and Zara and Conor are attracted to each other from the start. But how can an international model and a reclusive wildlife photographer forge anything that is lasting? Will they both end up with broken hearts? As I noted, this story is relatively low on angst and of course, given the disparity in their social bandwidth some conflict would be expected. However, Ms. Winters does not make the conflict outlandish or unmanageable. I enjoyed the story’s resolution, and my only small quibble is that the last two chapters featured only Zara’s thoughts; I would have appreciated “hearing” from Conor as the story concluded.
Favorite Lines:
The village might to been right to worry about me. But looking at her smile, I couldn’t bring myself to care.
“You make me feel like I exist,” I said fiercely and meant it.
“He doesn’t expect me to be anything other than myself”.
“That’s not the real world, Conor. That’s just the loud one”.
Two broken people trying to build something real from the pieces of their old lives.
https://theretiredreader.com/read-for...