The Lavender Bargain: a Sweet Small-Town Romance with Gentle Mystery

She came home to fail quietly. The town had other plans.Josie Marchetti has two hundred and eleven miles of apology in her mouth and ninety days from the bank in an envelope on the passenger seat.Her grandmother's lavender farm has been standing empty for two years. Forty acres, split down the middle, dying by the row. She'll cut what can be saved, sell what can't, and be back in Portland before anybody makes her a casserole.Except the gate is chained shut.Except the man who chained it is the county surveyor, he owns the only road in, and he has a very good reason he isn't ready to explain.Except somebody has been sweeping a dead woman's floor for two years, and there's honey on the kitchen table with a label dated last month.And somebody, every October since 1961, has been paid forty dollars - and nobody in this town will tell her what for.Elias Ford does not say much. He says even less about his mother. He has one thing left in the world that he can still choose, and he already knows what choosing it will cost him.Between them: a missing deed, a shopkeeper who has never answered a direct question, a developer who is unfailingly polite, and a very large disreputable dog with no loyalty whatsoever.They have until the twelfth of May.The Lavender Bargain is Book One of the Bellhaven Bay Romances.Sweet, closed-door small-town romance with a gentle mystery, a nosy and well-meaning town, and a guaranteed happily-ever-after in every book. No spice. No cliffhangers on the romance. Grumpy sunshine, coming home, forced proximity - and absolutely no third-act breakup, because nobody has time for that.