Honey and Ink

Marlow Prentice came home to Odell's Reach with two suitcases, her mother's recipe box, and hands that had forgotten how to make anything but resentment. Nine years in a celebrated city kitchen burned the joy clean out of her, and now her grandmother's failing apiary is one hard winter from gone — the shared wildflower meadow that feeds the hives lost to a lien she can't pay and a resort developer circling the shoreline like it already belongs to him.

Then Silas Renn walks up the dock road at seven in the morning with a jar of her own honey and an impossible proposition. The quiet beekeeper next door has run every number there is, and there's only one lever fast enough to save the acre their two families have shared for a century: marry him. On paper. A single household can hold the meadow where two broke neighbors can't. It doesn't have to be anything she doesn't want it to be — that's the fourth clause, the one he wrote to protect her from himself.

But a marriage of convenience is a dangerous place to keep discovering the truth. As the summer ripens and the fair-day deadline bears down, the developer's polite letters turn personal, the numbers turn against them, and the honest heat between a burned-out baker and a man who's carried everything alone for too long stops being anything either of them can put back on paper. Saving the meadow was always going to cost them. Marlow just had the price exactly backwards.

Some things you starve nearly to death — then you feed them a meadow and a marriage, and they come roaring back louder than before.

A warm, tender small-town summer arranged-marriage romance novella of approximately 23,000 words, with very mild sensual open-door intimacy and a guaranteed happily-ever-after. No cliffhangers. No cheating.