Nova Kessler hired Danni Ruiz to tear down a wall. She did not expect to spend eight weeks wondering what it would feel like to have Danni’s hands on her instead of the house.
At forty-seven and newly divorced, Nova is still figuring out what she wants when Danni walks into her home with a tool belt, a carpenter’s pencil in her hair, and the unnerving habit of actually listening when Nova speaks.
Danni is forty-nine, blunt, capable, and exactly the kind of woman Nova has never let herself want.
The attraction builds somewhere between sawdust and shared lunches, lingering touches and looks that last too long.
Then one Saturday morning, Danni shows up with no tools and no professional reason to be there.
They don’t make it past the stairs.
But wanting each other turns out to be the easy part.
Danni has learned not to get attached to women in the middle of starting over. Nova has spent twenty years being told what was practical, reasonable, and best for everyone else. Now she has an ex-husband watching from the sidelines, two children whose lives are changing with hers, and a neighborhood beginning to talk.
And the renovation still has weeks to go.
The wall Nova was told could never come down was never load-bearing at all.
She’s beginning to wonder what else she was wrong about.
True and Plumb is a spicy later-in-life sapphic romance featuring a soft-butch contractor, a newly divorced English teacher, forced proximity, slow-burn tension, explicit on-page heat, family, small-town gossip, and a guaranteed happy ending.
