Where the Bees Come Home: A Small-Town Romance (Bercenyland Book 1)

3 weeks to harvest. One yard to save. The state says Martha Calaway's hives are dying. Her records say they're not, and the only man who can prove it is the forest ranger she has spent years arguing with over a fence line.Martha Calaway runs 3 generations of apiary on the Bercenyland ridge, and she counts what the bees built, not the bees. When a quarantine order arrives weeks before the sourwood harvest, backed by a test the state won't re-run, she has 3 weeks to prove the blight in her yard is not what the notice says it is. The only records that might do it belong to the one person in the county she never wanted to owe anything.Wilhelm Mardi keeps records the way other people keep photographs: exact, dated, and untouched. 20 years on the same county line, and the rulebook has never once let him down. Until the statute asks him to help her hold the line against the one thing the rules were never written for.Neither of them planned on this. Neither of them can walk away from it either.What readers can expect- A small-town setting built around a family apiary and a honey house on the ridge, not another coastal inn- Dual point of view, alternating chapters- Clean, closed-door romance with a deadline neither of them chose- A hero with his own stake in what's being saved, and the records to prove it- Book 1 of 3 in the Bercenyland Small-Town Romance Series If you love a small town worth staying in, a hero who keeps records, and a love story with stakes attached to real ground and real craft, start with Where the Bees Come Home.