Peach Season

Half the orchard is hers. The other half belongs to a stranger.June Calloway has run Calloway Orchards for six years, through frosts, debt, and the long, slow end of the only man who ever taught her anything. When her grandfather's will is read, half of those two hundred and twenty acres come to her.The other half goes to a man nobody in Ashpole County has spoken of since 1968.Sam Ridgeway, the Atlanta estate lawyer sent up to settle it, has never heard of Hartley Bend. He has eleven months to partner, a mother who died without ever saying where she came from, and a developer offering four million dollars for 1,100 feet of river frontage. All he has to do is sign.Instead, he signs a ninety-day standstill, buys a pair of boots, and starts pruning.June has one growing season to buy him out, and only this summer's crop could ever do it. So they work the harvest together, one long Georgia summer of four-thirty mornings and smudge pots and a letter written in 1969 and never mailed, while the whole county watches and the clock runs down to the first Saturday in August.Book one of the Hartley Bend series. Sweet, closed door, and a guaranteed happy ending. Each book stands alone.