Second Impression

Sawyer Whitaker's most emotionally available relationship is a seventy-year-old printing press, and he's fine with that. Black Squirrel Press runs quiet: wedding invitations up front, his father's name on the glass. And out in the garage behind his mother's house — the one nobody's ever invited into — is the work no one has ever seen.

Then Harper Marchand walks back into his shop like the last eighteen years were a clerical error she's come to correct.

She's got a nonprofit, a grant with a deadline stapled to the back of it, and ten weeks to stand up a free community studio in the old Foxmeadow mill — a promise she made out loud, with a building and a date in the same sentence. She needs a printer who's good, who's local, and who won't ghost her in week four. She looked everyone up. He came out on top. Of course he did.

Now it's ten weeks of Harper reading his life off the walls of his own shop, an inspector with thirty years of bad news on his clipboard, a developer circling the mill, and a mother who sees more than either of them says. The pilot might fail. The building might not pass. And the thing Sawyer keeps in the garage might be the only thing that can save it — if he's finally willing to be seen.

Some people get a first impression. The ones who matter get a second.

A standalone contemporary romance in the Forge Valley novels. HEA guaranteed. Open door. Mature audiences.