Festival Flame Finders

Nesta Vance, a brilliant geologist in her mid-forties whose precision has long armored her against heartbreak, patrols the rugged granite ridges above Laurel Bend, West Virginia, in the shadowed hollers of the Appalachians. Scarred by a youthful summer romance shattered twenty years ago by a bitter family feud, Nesta has built a life of unyielding control, her heart as unyielding as the mountain stone she studies—until she uncovers a massive, shifting fissure in the quarry face, threatening to bury the town she calls home and cracking open her carefully sealed emotional fractures.

When Cade Thorne, the rugged quarryman who broke her heart by vanishing from her “perfect” plans, returns to the ridge to settle his father’s estate, their explosive reunion ignites old flames amid clashing visions for saving the mountain: her high-tech sensors against his intuitive knowledge of the earth’s hidden veins. With the town’s survival and their unresolved passion hanging in the balance, this second-chance romance promises a grounded, sensual journey through stone dust and seismic tremors, where two proud souls must bridge ancient grudges and personal rifts to forge an unbreakable foundation of love.