The #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Rebel Blue Ranch series returns to the haunted town of Sweetwater Peak for another love story, this one featuring an antiques shop owner and a farmer who fake a relationship to save their legacies . . . but will they be able to fool the ghosts of their past?
“Lyla Sage is the queen of dreamy, spooky, atmospheric small-town romances—I’ll read anything she writes.” —Iman Hariri-Kia, author of Female Fantasy
Clarke Cartwright probably needs to get out more. She just has a lot to do. Running Toade’s Antiques is no small feat, especially considering that the roof is in shambles and half her merchandise is unsellable. But dealing with that feels easier than her other option: chatting it up with the ghost of her childhood crush’s father, who just can’t seem to leave her alone.
Leith Wilkes has spent his life preparing to take over his family’s farm. Well, he’s actually spent most of his life flirting, but now he’s ready to buckle down, which has nothing to do with an oddly specific clause that his dad left in his inheritance. Leith is pretty sure he’s the only one who knows about it . . . until Clarke drunkenly spills that she knows, too, along with a bunch of other Wilkes family secrets.
Leith starts to wonder if there’s more to Clarke than she lets on . . . and if his dad has something to do with it. And if she is keeping secrets of her own, maybe she won’t mind helping him with his.
Release date:
September 22, 2026
Publisher:
The Dial Press
Print pages:
336
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There was a dead man across the table from me. If he wasn’t a ghost, I am sure his pleading eyes would be glistening with crocodile tears. But I was refusing eye contact, so I wouldn’t know. “C’mon, Clarke, please,” he said, bringing his clasped hands under his chin for maximum effect.
“I’m running out of secrets, Earnest.” I sighed, keeping my eyes on my laptop screen. I’d received three estimates for the new roof for Toades, my family’s antiques shop—or Premier Antiques Emporium as the sign says—and the fourth should’ve been coming in any minute. Baker told me it would be in today, but Sweetwater Peak locals prefer a slower life pace— especially in the winter—so in all actuality, Monday, or even Tuesday, was more likely. That, or he’d just decide to show up on my front porch tomorrow to tell me in person.
This place was both endearing and annoying. Two sides of the same rural coin.
“And I’m working,” I said. Toades suffered a lot of damage in a thunderstorm a few months ago, and repairs had been slow, to say the least. The roof was the biggest and most expensive undertaking. Even though my parents and I patched it the best we could and the tarps covering the gaping holes were miraculously still holding, I couldn’t put this roof off any longer.
Without the roof, the attic couldn’t be used for storage, and since my parents had spent the last thirty years collecting sh—stuff, I mean—much of the shop was now covered in boxes. Boxes that needed sorting, items that needed repairing or getting rid of. The past couple months had made me think about what I wanted Toades to look like when it was mine—if it would ever become mine. Fewer boxes were at the top of the list. Maybe then I’d stop feeling like my world was caving in on me.
Perhaps I should’ve let my parents handle this, but honestly, I didn’t know if they ever would handle it. They preferred to “let things work out,” while I preferred to work them out myself. If I was ever going to get the chance to run Toades, it at least had to remain standing—preferably with a halfway decent roof.
The sun was setting in Sweetwater Peak, Wyoming, flooding the inside of Toades in a burnt-orange and soft-pink glow. Normally, the warmth of the sunset through the glass would calm me down, but I’d been keyed up for months, with no end in sight. I rolled my shoulders back and down and tried to unclench my jaw, but it didn’t help.
“Please,” Earnest said. “It’s the last time I’ll ask this week—I promise.”
“It’s Friday.” I sighed again. “I won’t even see you again this week.” I would normally come in on a Saturday, but my mom thought I was working too much. So she essentially banned me from the store on Saturdays, and we were closed to foot traffic on Sundays and Mondays. Joanie Cartwright might appear sweet and gentle, but underneath her fringed floral dusters and lavender hair dye, she was not to be trifled with . . . on some matters.
My mom and I had been trifling about many things for months, so putting up a fight about Saturdays didn’t seem worth it in the grand scheme of everything else. Plus, I didn’t really want to spend the day with her at Toades anyway. And just because I wasn’t at the shop didn’t mean I couldn’t get work done. Whether I was at Toades or not, there was always something to be done—always something I could be doing. And if I wasn’t doing something, then the guilt would creep in.
If we were being truthful, I probably was working too much. I just . . . didn’t have anything better to do. My best friend, Sadie, moved to Arizona—she’d been a snowbird for the past few years, but this year she decided to make the move permanent. And my twin sister, Collins, wasn’t around either.
“Consider it a goodbye present, then,” Earnest said hopefully.
“You know,” I said, refreshing my email inbox, “if you weren’t already dead, I would kill you.”
Collins and I had these weirdo supernatural abilities: We could talk to and see ghosts. Maybe we never would’ve noticed or maybe it wouldn’t be such an integral part of ourselves if we grew up anywhere but Sweetwater Peak—it’s haunted as hell—or if our parents did anything else besides owning an antiques shop that was an absolute hotbed of paranormal activity. But we did and they do.
Collins loved our abilities. She found friendship and solace in interacting with the spirit realm. Me? Not so much. I didn’t hate it. I just preferred to keep most of my interactions with others on the living side of the earthly plane.
Our abilities also differed slightly. Collins usually only heard one voice at a time—like she was having a normal conversation. Unless I was focused on one ghost—like I was on Earnest right now—I didn’t always hear intelligible words. Mostly I got frequencies: high-pitched ringing or dull hums, something that sounded and felt like static when there were multiple ghosts around me at once. And since I seemed to be surrounded by ghosts no matter where I went, that static could get loud.
I think that was part of the reason I wasn’t as fond of our abilities as my twin sister. For Collins, it was as easy as breathing—as integral to her as oxygen. I had to work at it—at focusing in on one thing or at bringing the noise down. It didn’t always feel natural to me. It felt like there was always something trying to invade my space.
Most of the time, I was able to tune everything out. And with nearly thirty years of practice, I was good at that—reducing the presence of the ghosts to a dull hum. Sometimes I could quiet them so much that it just felt like white noise. I didn’t know what it said about me that I was better at shutting the ghosts up than talking to them.
At least, I had been, until recently. I didn’t know what was going on in the intersection between the supernatural realm and my head, but the buzzing had become more persistent and harder to tune out than usual—especially over the last couple of weeks. I chalked it up to stress and spending too much time at Toades. As if my plate wasn’t full enough already.
My dad always said that the best way through something is to just . . . get through it, and I was determined to put my head down and do just that. I hoped the new roof would get Toades and me right as rain.
Earnest was the exception to my lifelong feelings about the ghosts. He was family. He’d been at Toades since I was a kid—tethered to a record console upstairs. “Tethered” was the term that Collins and I came up for the deep connection ghosts had to an object that allowed them to remain after death.
Our parents bought the old record player console—at auction with a plan to sell it, which they obviously never did. So we grew up with Earnest around. Weirdly, he felt like the closest thing we had to a brother.
And much like I imagine a brother would, he was currently driving me f***ing nuts.
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