Back Home at Firefly Lake by Jen Gilroy: A Wonderful, Wintry Love Story

Back Home at Firefly Lake by Jen Gilroy is a wonderful love story set against wintry Firefly Lake, Vermont; perfect to curl up with by the fire sipping a large mug of hot chocolate!
It's the third part of Jen's Firefly Lake trilogy which focuses, this time, on Cat McGuire, Nick's sister from Summer on Firefly Lake (although each of the books stands alone) and NHL* hero and Olympian ice hockey player, Luc Simard.
However, for me, re-engaging with all the other characters in the previous two books was like going back home, and I'd settled in before the end of the first chapter!
Firefly Lake is a small town community, and Jen Gilroy gives an excellent picture of what you'd imagine it to be like to live there in the winter time: snow, ice, hockey, everyone knowing everyone's business and, romance!
Cat has returned to the town with her daughter, Amy. She has a grant to work on a research project, which she hopes will get her that university job she's dreamt of for years, but she doesn't want to stay with her mother, Gabrielle, at Harbor House, preferring to be self-sufficient and rent an apartment over the craft gallery in return for payment and helping out.
Widower, Luc, Nick's friend, whose dad and brothers run the creamery, has left NHL after a shoulder injury and returned to the lake as well, building a new house where he can make a new start and get over the death of his wife, Maggie, who was expecting their first baby. However, the junior league ice hockey coach breaks his leg, so Luc takes over the training and allows twelve-year-old Amy, a keen hockey player back in Boston, to join the team.
After all these years since they were together at school, when although he was friendly enough, and she admired him from a distance, Cat and Luc can't help finding each other attractive, but is this what they both really want and where will it end, especially when Amy tries to get them together?
It's an engrossing story, full of ups and downs that make you want to keep reading to the final page to find out what happens! I loved it.

*National Hockey League, for those not living in North America!