Rival Accord

Rennie Doucet has twenty-three notebooks, a hot plate, a scar on her thumb to prove she started young, and until September thirtieth to find a new home for her tiny perfume business. Then she hears that an eighty-one-year-old woman on Royal Street is about to give away a historic New Orleans perfume house for one dollar, and Rennie shows up with a shoebox of forty hand-made samples and every intention of winning it. She is not the only one who has come. Kit Ashworth spent twelve years making the scent of Linen Morning, a smell that eleven million American households live inside without ever noticing. Precise, polished, and quietly out of ideas, he has rented a lopsided shotgun house on Piety Street and been handed an impossible brief: make me this city in August. Her instinct against his spreadsheet. Her notebooks against his four hundred and twelve rows. One shared lab, one house, one season of heat, storms, and long hours that smell like jasmine and river silt. Neither of them planned on a partner, and neither expected the hardest thing to blend would be the two of them. A Rival Accord is a warm, sensory, slow-burn rivals-to-lovers romance about craft and ambition, second chances, and the scent of the place you finally call home. Clean, closed-door romance with a happily ever after.