The Sunrise Wager

The Sunrise Wager
A Leafwood Falls Story

All books in the Leafwood Falls series can be read as stand-alones.

Bianca Romano comes home to Leafwood Falls with a glass house, a half-built office, and a wild turkey she's made the mistake of naming Gary. Her plan is the same as it is every year. Fix what's broken, eat at her parents' restaurant, be gone before anyone asks her something she'd have to answer.

She certainly doesn't plan on the dating app she built matching her with Will Abbott.

Will teaches English at their old high school, with chalk on his sleeve and a dead poet for every occasion. He's poetry where Bianca is spreadsheets, a grand gesture where she's a stopwatch, and he'll say anything at all, so long as somebody else wrote it first. Eighteen years ago he said something to her in front of the whole town, and she never answered.

So they make a bet: who can make the other fall in love first. If Will loses, no quoting anyone for a year. If Bianca loses, no getting up before eight, which costs her the one secret she's kept from everyone. Every sunrise.

One bet. One chalkboard keeping score. Two people who've spent eighteen years not saying words they've always wanted to say.

And nobody in Leafwood Falls will let them do it quietly.

There's a poetry slam where the poems are terrible and the whole town turns up anyway. There's Hemingway, the orange bookshop cat, who purrs for exactly one person. And there's the town itself, kind and nosy and far too good at hearing what you haven't said.

The problem is, they make each other laugh. They always have. Telling each other the truth is the part they've never tried.

As the city calls her back, Bianca has to choose between slipping quietly away, again, and the terrifying thing she's never managed: answering him, out loud, where the whole town can hear.

A slow-burn, second-chance romance about poetry, evidence, one furious turkey, and finally saying it in your own words.

Return to Leafwood Falls, where the magic is quiet, the town is not, and every sunrise is worth getting up for.