The Rival's Bargain

The road into Tremayne is one car wide now, hedgerows pressing in, brambles scratching paint Rowan Penrose paid good money for. Surgeon's hands, steady through eight-hour operations, shake on the wheel of a drive he has not made in twenty-three years. His cousin Morwenna is waiting at the gate with a clipboard and a fox-thin smile. Behind her, in the gravel turnaround where his grandfather used to park the Bentley, stand forty villagers with hand-painted signs. OUR LAND. HANDS OFF. TREMAYNE IS NOT FOR SALE. At the front, not shouting, is a thickset man in a faded blue jumper with a silver chain at his throat. *That's what Penroses do. Take what they want, leave the mess, and never look back.* Jago Trevithick fishes out of the harbour below the estate. He argues that the sale would take the village's fishing rights with it, and he has the receipt: a compact signed in 1742, copied out of the parish archives, folded and unfolded so many times the creases have gone soft. Rowan came to sell a house to a buyer called Maddock Hendrix and be gone inside a week. Then a pier gives way under him and he comes up holding a child. Elowen is Jago's niece, copper-braided and relentless, and she needs a tutor for a local history project. Jago is a widower. His husband Llew was a paramedic. Every Sunday he still writes letters to him at the kitchen table and burns them afterwards. What the two men slowly uncover is uglier than a land dispute. Rowan's father kept a photograph of Jago's father behind crime scene tape in a locked room at the top of the house. Jago's father was writing to Llew about something he had found there. Somebody did not want it found. And while they are working that out, a letter appears that Jago never wrote, and Elowen's mother drives down from London to take her daughter back. A Cornish enemies-to-lovers romance between two men who each believe the other is the problem - closed-door, with a grieving widower, a niece worth fighting for, a village that has been holding the line for generations, and a house that has to be opened rather than sold.