Sous chef Laura Hollings has left her prestigious job at a Michelin-star restaurant to run the Willow Falls Inn, a fixer-upper in the historic river town, Willow Falls. The inn’s turnaround was never going to be easy, a task made doubly hard now that a freak storm has washed out the town’s one-and-only bridge.
But Laura’s not a quitter. Come hell or high water, she’ll turn the inn’s fortunes around and reopen its defunct restaurant into a farm-to-table dining destination.
Enter Landon Ford, the tall, broad-shouldered structural engineer building the new bridge. He’s smart, sexy, gruff and wanting to be anywhere but Willow Falls. After several building delays, he’s determined to make his exit plan a reality.
In the meantime, he’s Laura’s newest guest at the inn, and her newest, daily source of irritation. While Laura doesn’t like relying on others, Landon asserts himself when he thinks he’s right, which, much to her annoyance, he often is.
As the tension builds, it’s a cage match waiting to happen. It doesn’t help that Landon finds the fiery innkeeper exceedingly beautiful, and she finds the structural engineer’s “do what needs doing” attitude sexy.
Perhaps they’re not so incompatible after all.
A series of weather events, job offers, late nights dancing, and later nights wandering the ruins of an eighteenth century mill town, force Laura and Landon to lean on one another. But can the truce last?