🏡 Small Town Romance

Rae works the overnight shift at a 24-hour diner off the interstate. Same truckers, same coffee, same nothing. Then a quiet stranger starts showing up every Tuesday at 2 AM — and two months later, she sees his face on the news.

She spent ten years saving her family's vineyard — then lost it to the corporate raider who bought up the debt. He came to liquidate the land and move on to the next deal. But the estate can't be sold until the season's harvest is in, so he keeps her on to bring it home: one last crush, and then he sells out from under her. She has until the final grape is picked to prove the place is worth more whole than carved up for parts — and he means to be gone the moment it's done. Neither of them planned on the long nights in the cellar, or how hard it is to walk away from something you've started to build.

When a small-town veterinarian inherits her grandmother's cabin in a mountain town she's never heard of, nothing adds up. Everyone's too healthy, too quiet, too watchful. Her grandmother's journal is full of drawings of wolves with human eyes and notes about a debt unpaid. The brooding man who runs the hardware store keeps showing up to fix things she didn't ask to be fixed. And her dog won't stop growling at him.