ARC readers wanted

The Standing Rate

Edie Strand — a Halloway novel

She inherited half a dying lakeside inn. He owns the other half and wants out. In the drawer between them are eleven hundred index cards, each one a promise made to a couple on their wedding night: come back on your anniversary, any year, for as long as you both live, and pay what you paid the first night. Ninety of those promises are still alive. The inn is $318,000 in debt. They have one winter.

Get the free copy Free · honest review welcome · never required

Before you request it — this is a quiet book. It takes its time, the comedy is dry, and the first three chapters are two competent people and a cold building before they are a couple. If you read for yearning, for people who are very good at their work, and for a happy ending you have to wait for, this is for you. If you want banter from page one, it is not.

Forced proximity · Grumpy & sunshine · Small town
Slow burn · He falls first · Dual POV
Explicit · Guaranteed HEA · No cheating · No cliffhanger

Content notes

Explicit sexual content (heat 4 of 5, four full scenes). Off-page death of an elderly character after an unnamed illness; grief and bereavement; financial precarity, debt and the threat of foreclosure; chronic pain and a degenerative joint condition; occupational burnout; one grief-driven dangerous decision (a woman crosses unsafe ice alone at night — nothing happens to her); occasional strong language.

No sexual violence, no infidelity, no harm to any child or animal, no pregnancy loss, and no violence of any kind on the page. The dog is fine.