The Land She Left Me: A Small-Town Marriage-of-Convenience Romance: 6

She inherited forty acres and a year she can't afford. He needs a wife to keep the only home he's got. One dead woman's will is about to solve both their problems - and break the one rule that could destroy them.Rae Donovan has spent her whole life being told she came from nowhere.So when a lawyer hands her forty acres and a falling-down cabin in a Colorado town she's never heard of - left by a grandmother she never knew existed - she plans to sell it the second she legally can and go back to traveling light, the way the women in her family always have.There's just one problem. The will says she has to live on the land for a full year first.And the quiet rancher next door has a problem of his own.Hollis Hartley has been the dependable one for two grieving families his whole life, and he's never once let himself want a single thing for himself. Now the ranch he's given eight years to is his for the taking - except a hundred-year-old covenant says the operator has to be married, and Hollis has no one. Worse, Rae's forty acres sit right in the middle of the grazing lease that keeps the whole ranch alive.Her problem and his problem have exactly one solution.A marriage. On paper. One year. Separate houses, separate lives, no feelings - just two signatures that save two futures.But Rae has one condition: nobody buries the true thing here. No pretending. No hidden agendas. Everything on the table.It's the one promise Hollis has already broken - and the truth is sitting in a drawer twelve feet from where she sleeps.As a hard mountain winter drives them under one roof, as a town full of familiar faces folds Rae in, and as the story of the grandmother who was run out of Cedar Ridge sixty years ago finally comes to light, two people who've spent their whole lives leaving first will have to decide whether the thing they built to be fake is the realest home either of them has ever had - before a buried truth costs them everything.The Land She Left Me is the heartfelt, open-door finale of the Cedar Ridge series - a marriage-of-convenience, forced-proximity, small-town romance about found family, second chances, and the courage to stay. Guaranteed happily-ever-after. Can be read as a standalone.