Stall Twelve

She sows annuals for a reason. Nothing that expects her to come back.

Nell Quayle lives out of a battered sage-green camper van called Sylvie, selling hand-milled soap and jam jars of sweet peas one farmers' market at a time. She sings to her flowers, feeds a roll to a grieving baker, saves coins and stems for a watchful boy who drifts in out of the dark — and she never, ever stays past the last Saturday of the season. Staying, she learned a long time ago, is just the slow way to get left behind. So she keeps driving, and she keeps a rose in a pot she's never once dared to plant.

Then the market's new booking system double-allocates Stall Twelve — the prime corner, hers for three seasons — and a surgically white refrigerated van slides into the gap beside her.

Rafe Ostler is granite-jawed, immovable, and armed with a paper clipboard and a rule for every occasion. His family cheese farm is failing, his grief has no name, and he has renewed that pitch eleven years running. He is exactly the sort of man Nell did not plan for. They bicker over customers and sabotage each other's displays; they chase the same county-show ribbon across the narrow aisle where their two lives are suddenly forced shoulder to shoulder.

But rivalry has a way of thawing. A coffee left without a word. A rescue in the rain. A flooded road that strands two of the most stubborn people in the county in nobody's company but each other's. And as June softens into autumn and the last Saturday looms, Nell finds herself facing the one thing that frightens her more than any goodbye ever has.

Warm, funny, and achingly tender, Stall Twelve is a grumsy-sunshine, slow-burn romance for readers who love small-town charm, second chances, and the terrifying, glorious possibility of staying.

Sometimes the bravest thing isn't running. Turn the first page and find out.