Peak Poppy Pulse
Placeholder description — update later.
Premise
Stephanie Ward, a restless traveling florist from Redford Hollow who fled her Appalachian roots—and a shattered first love—years ago after her family's farm failed, returns to the fog-shrouded Smoky Summit ridges to revive a crumbling Victorian greenhouse tangled in wild poppies. Haunted by the ache of rootlessness and the guilt of abandoning her heritage, she dives into the dusty ledgers and forgotten seed packets, determined to reclaim a piece of her past. But when local orchard keeper Matthew Collins—still nursing the raw wound of her sudden departure a decade earlier, which left him wary of love and clinging to his family's fading legacy—saves her from a rotted irrigation ditch on her first day, their charged reunion stirs embers long thought cold. As county planner Richard Thompson descends with bulldozers to raze the greenhouse for a soulless subdivision, Stephanie and Matthew forge an uneasy alliance to unearth heirloom seeds and phantom winds hinting at the valley's lost magic, racing to rally the community before everything is bulldozed. With their family's intertwined histories unraveling through eerie chimes and swirling petals, they risk not only the land's irreplaceable heritage but the fragile chance to heal old betrayals and nurture a love that could bloom anew amid the misty hollows—promising a heartfelt second-chance romance laced with Appalachian mystery and the tender pull of rediscovered roots.
Summary
Structural blueprint for Book 38 of the Smoky Summit Souls series.