The Rival's Ruthless Heart

*I'm telling you, the lock's older than my grandmother.* Lena Hartwell is on her knees on damp concrete with a borrowed pick set, working three pins by ear. Three days until the demolition vote. Three days to find the original blueprints of a building that has been locked since her grandmother's hip gave out last spring. The basement is flooded to the waterline on the wall. Old posters peel off in long wet strips, her grandmother's name in curling script under the title role. Lena wades to the last filing cabinet, wrenches the bottom drawer open, and finds the structural plans dated 1912. She also finds a locket. Silver, tarnished to charcoal, three roses engraved around a hidden clasp. A photograph of a dark-haired young man she has never seen sits inside it, and opposite the picture, an inscription in handwriting she knows from the margins of her grandmother's scripts. *To my rescuer, always.* Her grandfather's hand. Around a photograph that is not her grandfather. A beam creaks. There is a man on the stairs in a dark suit who is not remotely surprised to find her there, and who walks down into the cold water without flinching. Spencer Lang wants the Rosewood Theatre demolished and a waterfront tower put up in its place. He has the inspection reports, a permit approved pending the vote, and a councilman he says already has the numbers. He has also watched her put the locket in her pocket. *It belongs to my family.* *It belongs to mine.* He tells her the man in the photograph is his father, and that the locket was supposed to be buried with him. Nobody standing in that water can explain how her grandfather's handwriting ended up on the back of it. What comes after is a council hearing, a preservation fight fought with structural reports and sentiment in roughly equal measure, a restoration trust funded out of the wrong pocket, and a crescent-shaped scar on Spencer's left thumb from a building collapse he cannot remember. An enemies-to-lovers small-town romance in dual point of view, with a flooded theatre basement, a locket in the wrong family's drawer, a grandmother who has been arranging the past very carefully for a long time, and a marquee that eventually lights up again. The romance is closed-door.