The Heirloom and the Wild
A Finger Lakes Cider Romance

About this book:

Arthur Pendelton makes cider the way his great-grandfather did: wild yeast, French oak, straw filters, and the patience to let the vintage speak for itself. Maya Lin makes cider in stainless tanks with ultrasonic degassers, isolated yeast strains, and a food scientist’s precision. Their orchards share a fence line on Seneca Lake, their tasting rooms share a customer base, and their mutual disdain shares a distinct, crackling chemistry.

When a savage early freeze threatens to turn both their harvests into mush, the rivalry curdles into something far more dangerous: a desperate, three-day scramble to save forty acres of fruit. Forced into an uneasy truce, Arthur and Maya discover that the line between "farmyard funk" and "flawless precision" is thinner than a cork seal—and that the most complex vintage they’ll ever blend might be the one they’re fermenting between them.

Set against the golden light and biting winds of a Finger Lakes autumn, *The Heirloom and the Wild* is a steamy, slow-press enemies-to-lovers romance where every chapter title is a cidermaking term, every argument is foreplay, and the only thing more intoxicating than the cider is the truth that some things—like love—can’t be rushed, controlled, or filtered. They have to be tasted.