Stay for the Summer: A Small-Town Montana Second Chance Cowboy Romance

Every Tuesday for four years I have cooked my mother's recipe for six people.Nobody comes.The card is in her handwriting. Brown before you braise, salt at the end, and at the bottom, in her hand, it says enough for whoever shows up. I cook it in her pot. I set the table. I eat at one end of it, and wash up, and put the card away, and enter the evening in my book under a heading that is not food.I run this family's estate. I price things. It is the only way I have ever known how to look at something.Which is the problem with Wes Corbin.Seventeen seasons that man has run boats off our dock, and the entire record is a handshake and a line in my father's writing. Every asset has to be papered by the first of June or the payment plan's second year doesn't hold. So I drafted him fourteen clauses and two exhibits.He said sure before I got to the number.He has never sent an invoice in his life. He buys a fifteen-year-old boy's breakfast and hides it inside his own bill so the kid never finds out. My accounts can be audited. His can only be believed.Then one Tuesday he knocked, and did the thing nobody in my family has managed in four years, which is nothing. He didn't ask what the recipe was, or whose. He didn't ask why a woman alone cooks for six. He sat at my counter and made the room easy and left every drawer of mine shut and had seconds, and the pot went to nearly gone, which it had been waiting four years to do.So I drafted terms for that too. One summer. Nothing on paper. The mornings stay adversarial. It ends when the season ends, and neither of us relitigates it in August.He said sure to that as well.Now there is a man across the water with cream stationery and an offer that expires on the fifteenth, and a fire one ridge east of being ours, and a summer with a death date written into it by me.Fifteen years ago I was nineteen on that dock with him and the sky coming apart, and at seven ten the next morning I got on a bus with the sentence unfinished behind me.He has said yes to everything I have ever put in front of him.That has never once been the same as being asked.One of us will have to ask out loud.Stay for the Summer is a small-town cowboy romance: a woman who prices everything, a man who has never charged for anything, fifteen years of unfinished business, a summer with an expiry date on it, dual POV, a slow burn that pays off, open-door heat that takes its time, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Dry banter, high tension, no third-act misunderstanding. Perfect for readers of Devney Perry, Lyla Sage and Elsie Silver.Every Sorrel Lake Ranch book stands alone. The family's fourteen years run through all six.Come for a week. Stay for a life.