Good Fences by Lilith Ember

He tore down the fence her father built. She's been watching him fix everything else ever since.

Luke Carver came to Harlow Falls with a six-week plan: fix up his uncle's house, sell it, leave. He's good at leaving. He's been building exits for most of his adult life, and this town was just another job. Then he pulled down the rotted cedar fence between his yard and hers, and Dana Reyes appeared at the property line with her arms crossed and her eyes doing that thing where they read you completely before you've said a word.

She runs Quinn's Hardware — her father's store, her name on the deed, every price memorized. She knows every family in Harlow Falls, every board that needs replacing, every contractor who thinks a small town is a project to be flipped rather than a place where people actually live. She's been watching people leave since she was twenty-four. She stopped making it easy for herself to care about the ones who are going to.

He keeps needing things from her store. She keeps knowing exactly where they are.

By week three it's just an hour drive to a lumber mill and a beer on the back porch and the particular gravity of two people who are being honest with each other for the first time in a long time. By week five he hasn't called the listing agent. By week six he's looking at an empty lot two blocks down and doing math that doesn't add up to leaving.

Some things take longer to build than six weeks. Some fences, once torn down, stay down.

Steamy small town romance. Slow burn that pays off fully. MF. No cheating. HEA guaranteed.