THE TRUCE

I don’t hate Asa Marsh. I hate that I need him.

Twenty-five days before Christmas Eve, my grandmother’s tree farm is one missed payment from becoming a parking lot — and the only way to save it is to win the town’s First Frost Festival, which means partnering with the festival co-chair. Who happens to be the heir to the family that’s been trying to bury mine since before either of us was born.

Wren Callahan came home to bury her grandmother, not to grovel to an Marsh. But The Hollow is all she has left, and Asa — infuriating, carefully polite, impossible to read Asa — has exactly what she needs: festival votes, town goodwill, and a secret she’s not supposed to know.

Asa Marsh has spent his life being the reasonable one, the Marsh who doesn’t start fights. He didn’t start this one either — his father did, generations ago, over a water line and a grudge nobody alive can fully explain. But watching Wren Callahan fight for a dying farm with her whole wrecked heart is making him reckless for the first time in his life, and reckless is the one thing a Marsh is never allowed to be.

Every hour they spend decorating the square together is an hour closer to midnight on Christmas Eve, when the festival votes are counted, the loan comes due, and the truce they never officially called has to become something neither family will forgive.

What’s Inside:

Small-town Christmas setting
Enemies-to-lovers / rival families
Forbidden romance (generational feud)
Forced proximity (festival committee)
Grumpy-adjacent hero, stubborn heroine
Found family & hometown healing
One bed (festival cabin, naturally)
Grand gesture finale
Guaranteed HEA

Standalone. Can be read on its own — first in a connected small-town series. HEA guaranteed.

Heat: Steamy, open-door (explicit, consensual, adults only).

Perfect for readers who love rival-family romance, holiday forced proximity, and slow-burn banter that turns into something neither of them can take back.