The Harvest Affair

About this book

He owns six hundred acres, a hundred employees and three states' worth of contracts. He is up a ladder over Main Street, hanging the town's café lights himself, because that is what you do.

Josie Callahan drives nine hours from Boston with a moving truck behind her, a layoff in her rearview, and a plan: fix up the bakery she just inherited, sell it in the spring, and get her life back.

The plan survives about four minutes. That's how long it takes to spill an entire coffee in her own lap at a four-way stop, stand on the brakes for a runaway dog, and look up at the man who came off that ladder to catch it — who knew her grandmother's name, and flinched when he heard it.

Nate Hale is the richest man in the county and the last person in Vermont who will admit it. He's a widower. He has a seven-year-old, a rule about only speaking once per town meeting, and a deeply held policy of never needing a single thing from anybody.

He breaks the rule for her in week one. In public.

Two weeks later they're co-chairing the same Harvest Fair pavilion — same tent, same long nights, same four hundred pounds of flour — and Josie finds a loan statement her grandmother never mentioned, with a number on the second page and a date in November.

Forty-seven thousand dollars. Due the fifteenth.

He could write that check without noticing it had gone. She has already told him to his face exactly what she thinks of being rescued — and he is the one man rich enough, and stubborn enough, to respect that and hate it.

And underneath all of it is a photograph from 1971 of two young women laughing on the church steps — Josie's grandmother and Nate's mother — who spent thirty years in the same small town and never spoke again, and nobody left alive will say why.

Some things you can't fix by yourself. That's not the same as not fixing them.

A warm, funny, steamy small-town romance about a bakery worth saving, a very rich man who is very bad at being helped, and a town that receives you whether or not you meant to stay.

Tropes: small town · single dad · rich hero / ordinary heroine · forced proximity · fresh start · co-chairs to lovers · he falls first · found family · a light multi-generational mystery · open door · HEA, no cheating, no cliffhanger.

Book One of the Marigold Falls Billionaires — each book is a complete, standalone romance in the same Vermont town.

Come to Marigold Falls for the harvest and stay for the people who refuse to let you leave.