The Lie He Chose Over Me by Bryn Ledbetter

She asked her husband to say he believed her. He asked a question instead.

Scout Whittaker has been married to the president of the Anvil Creek MC for eleven years. She has bandaged his brothers, fed them at her table, and buried one of them. So when Chance comes home on their anniversary carrying lilies he would never have chosen, she knows before he says a word.

Five weeks with his bookkeeper. He tells her at the kitchen table.

Three hours later the club calls Scout to church and accuses her of being the informant. Towing manifests in her garage. Eight thousand dollars in marked cash at the bottom of a storage tote. An access card with her own fingerprints on it. Every man in that room is waiting for her husband to speak.

Chance says: "I need to understand how that card got in your bag."

It is not the affair that ends the marriage. It is the eight seconds after that sentence.

Four years later Scout's younger brother is run off a county road at one in the morning, and she comes back to a town that never cleared her name. Underneath the frame she finds something worse than an affair: a brother wearing the same patch who built it, and a death nobody ever called a murder.

Chance Whittaker has spent four years learning exactly what he did. He is about to find out that it buys him nothing, and that the woman who came back is not the one who left.

A second-chance motorcycle-club romance about a woman framed by the institution that should have protected her, by the man who should have believed her. Anvil Creek MC, Book Two. A complete standalone with a guaranteed happy ending. Dual point of view.

Content note: infidelity, explicit love scenes, strong language, grief and past pregnancy loss, the death of a parent, motorcycle-club violence, a vehicle assault causing serious injury, public corruption, and references to parental abuse. For adult readers.