Meet Sabrina and Mason
I want to tell you about the moment this one became a book.
I had a flower shop, a burst pipe, and a florist standing ankle-deep in her own ruined evening. I had a contractor about to walk through the door and be charming at her, because that is what he does and it has never once failed him.
And then she wouldn't get down off the stool.
He'd told her to go find something dry. Perfectly reasonable. Any sensible woman climbs down. But Sabrina Marsden decided that a woman who comes off a stool the second a man tells her to has told him something about herself — and she has not been in that town long enough to start telling people things.
So she stayed up there. Wet shirt, mop, and all.
Here's how it goes:
"I'll get down when I'm ready to get down."
That is the first thing I ever say to Mason Duffield.
He doesn't argue. That's the trouble with him, as it turns out. He doesn't do a single one of the things I have braced for.
He just comes in. Boots and all, straight into two inches of standing water like he holds the deed to my floor, and he walks right past me without so much as glancing up, and he starts looking at my shop.
Not at the wall. At the room.
"That's nine buckets," he says.
"...Yes."
"Nine full ones, up on that table, and there's no cart in here to have done it with." He isn't asking me anything. He's reading it off the floor the way I'd read a stem. "That's a couple hundred pound moved by hand. In the dark. Fast enough to beat the water."
That's the book. She came ready for a fight and he handed her an assessment instead, and neither one of them recovers.
About ROOTED
Sabrina came to Calico Creek, Texas with a truck, a botany degree, and a lease she signed at one in the morning without reading twice. Six weeks later her wall bursts, there's a copperhead under her shipping rack, and the contractor her landlord swore would be there right quick turns up an hour and a half late wearing cologne.
Mason Duffield has the best grin in three counties. Three other men in that town have asked Sabrina out and all three got told no, and Mason has never in his life been told no, and he considers this a solvable problem.
It is not a solvable problem.
Then a developer out of Dallas starts asking around about which buildings on Main Street belong to who — and saving her shop is going to take a ring, a story, and an entire town that believes every word of it.
The part I didn't plan
The funniest thing in this book turned out not to be a joke. It's a collision.
I'm a northern New England woman. Where I'm from, if you want to know something you ask it, out loud, with the words in it, and somebody answers, and you're both done.
East Texas does not work that way. East Texas sets the question out on the table alongside about forty other things and waits to see whether you'll pick it up.
So there's a scene where the mother of the bride calls to ask whether blush flowers hold up in damp weather. She is not calling about the flowers. She is calling because her only daughter is getting married and she keeps going into that girl's room. Sabrina, being Sabrina, answers the question that was asked. Accurately. Kindly, even.
That poor woman went and cried about it over her eggs.
I laughed out loud writing it, then felt terrible, then realized that's the whole book too.
Tropes: fake engagement · small town · forced proximity · he falls first · fish out of water · found family · save the small business · HEA
Heat: open door
ROOTED is the first book in the Calico Creek series, and it's coming soon. The cover went up on my website and Instagram this week if you'd like to see the two of them.
Adding it to your Want to Read means the world.