Southern Surrender

Fourteen years ago, Amelia Hart left the stagnant air and suffocating secrets of Hartsville, Georgia, with the dust of her father's peach orchard on her heels and a vow never to look back. Now a high-powered Atlanta marketing executive, she has returned to the red clay only to bury her past and sell the failing estate that has become a monument to her family's bitterness.

She expects to sign a few papers and retreat to her life of glass offices and silk blouses, but the land she tried to forget has other plans.

Jake Harlan is a man forged in fire and hardened by silence. A former Marine and single father, he has spent years fighting the skeletal remains of his own orchard while guarding a legacy of regional grudges and personal loss. To him, Amelia is a "city shark" carrying his enemy's name-a woman whose return threatens to unearth the very secrets he's spent a lifetime trying to keep buried.

But as a predatory developer moves in to strip both their farms of the water they need to survive, the high, jagged fence between the Hart and Harlan properties begins to crumble. Forced into a fragile alliance to save the ground beneath their feet, Amelia and Jake discover that the fire between them burns hotter than the Georgia sun.

From the sharp, icy bite of a January morning to the sweet, heavy scent of a July harvest, they find themselves caught in a slow-burn tension that defies decades of family history. In a town where the truth is hidden deep within the roots of the trees, they must decide if they are willing to surrender their pride for a love that could finally mend the broken lines of the red clay.