The Schoolhouse on Sweetgum Road
A Second Chance Romance

About this book:

Ten years ago, Maya Vance fled Sweetgum, Georgia, with a scholarship and a broken heart, leaving behind Jesse Mercer and the dusty pine woods she swore never to see again. Now a historic preservation specialist, she's back on an emergency grant to save the Rosenwald schoolhouse—a rare, surviving monument to a Black community's resilience—from the wrecking ball. Standing in her way: Jesse, now a broad-shouldered contractor with a county demolition contract, a crew depending on his payroll, and a grandfather's deathbed confession that buildings don't matter—people do. The chemistry between them is as volatile as the century-old heart pine they're fighting over, and the thirty-day stay Maya secured is the only thing keeping the bulldozers at bay.

As Maya crawls through crawlspaces documenting virgin longleaf timber and Jesse dismantles the "non-structural" elements she's sworn to protect, their professional war becomes a deeply personal excavation. Every hand-beaded windowsill her great-uncle planed, every fieldstone her grandfather hauled by mule, pulls them deeper into a shared history they never properly buried. But the bypass deadline is immovable, the grant money is theoretical, and Jesse's pragmatism clashes with Maya's conviction that some structures hold souls worth saving. With the town council betting on progress and the past demanding to be heard, they have three weeks to decide whether a future together can be built on a foundation that's already cracked—or if some things really are meant to stay demolished.

Atmospheric and emotionally razor-sharp, *The Schoolhouse on Sweetgum Road* is a second-chance romance where the stakes are measured in board feet and heartbeats, where preservation meets progress, and where two people who once knew every secret of each other's hands must learn whether love, like old-growth pine, can withstand the rot of time—and be restored to something stronger than before.