Rot Sweet

She came back for the house. He was already inside it.

Nine years ago, Nola Deveraux left Bellefonte Parish with a duffel bag and a Greyhound ticket and a promise to herself that she would never return. She kept that promise - until a lawyer's voicemail told her that her mother was dead and had left her a house she thought was lost to back taxes and neglect.

There's just one problem. Someone already lives there.

Judah Voss is not a man who gives ground. Built from poverty and violence, he has spent three years rebuilding the Deveraux house board by board, nail by nail, turning a rotting shell into something that stands. He has a deed with his name on it. He has a dead woman's promise locked behind a deadbolt. And he has no intention of leaving.

Nola has a will. Judah has a deed. Both documents are legal. Neither party will concede. And under Louisiana law, they are trapped - co-owners of a contested property, forbidden to sell, forced to coexist in a house that holds more than either of them knows.

The attraction is immediate, combative, and inconvenient. Judah watches her the way he watches a storm - calculating the damage. Nola files him away the way she files evidence - thoroughly, involuntarily, with growing irritation at her own attention. He cooks for two without asking. She brings him water on the roof without being thanked. The proximity is unbearable. The distance is worse.

But the house has secrets older than the property dispute.

A Bible with annotations in Lorraine's handwriting. A locked room full of letters no one was meant to read. A magnolia tree in the backyard that Judah was sworn never to dig near - a tree planted the year Nola was born, growing enormous on soil fed by something richer than rain.

Nola's mother didn't just leave her a house. She left her the truth. And the truth is buried twenty feet from the kitchen door, beneath the roots of the tree she was named for.

As Nola uncovers what Lorraine confessed and Judah has been guarding, every wall between them collapses - the legal wall, the emotional wall, the wall between protector and threat. He kept her mother's darkest secret to honor a dying woman's wish. She has to decide whether the man who held that secret is the one who broke her trust or the one who earned it.

Meanwhile, a land developer is circling the property, and arson in the night proves the threat is not just legal. The fight for the house becomes a fight for the parish, and Nola - the daughter who left - becomes the woman who stays.

Rot Sweet is a Southern Gothic dark romance about inherited violence, buried truths, and the terrible beauty of things that grow in the worst soil. It is the first book in the Hollow County series.