Gossip Creek Grace
Placeholder description — update later.
Premise
Jessa Vance, a brilliant botanist in her late fifties, tends her family's heirloom apple orchard on the mist-shrouded ridges of Laurel Bend, West Virginia, where the Appalachian hollers cradle generations of Vance legacy. Scarred by a devastating feud thirty years ago that shattered her passionate romance with Silas Thorne and forced her to bury her heart beneath layers of scientific rigor, Jessa has channeled her loneliness into unyielding independence, prioritizing data over desire as the orchard's sole guardian. When a rare fungal blight—genetically tied to grafts Silas himself made decades earlier—threatens to condemn the trees and erase her family's history, the rugged traditionalist returns uninvited, armed with forgotten maps and radical remedies that clash with her modern methods. As corporate saboteurs circle and buried secrets of stolen land resurface, Jessa risks not just the orchard's survival but the walls around her guarded heart, promising a searing second-chance romance where intellectual sparks ignite into mature, orchard-scented passion, forging unity from rivalry in a tender journey toward rooted redemption.
Summary
Structural blueprint for Book 18 of the Holler Flame Echoes series.