Some things are worth fixing properly, even if it takes longer.
When Clara Bennett's father breaks his knee three weeks before Willow Creek's biggest Christmas tradition, she trades her tidy New York life for a suitcase, a legal pad, and a family inn that's quietly falling apart. The porch sags. The roof leaks. And the wishing well her grandfather built by hand, the one every guest photographs, the one her mother filled with fifty years of Christmas Eve hopes, has cracked clean through.
Worse, there's a buyer circling, and Clara's father is tired enough to say yes.
Enter Sawyer Reed: the steady, sawdust-dusted carpenter next door, and the boy Clara left without a goodbye nine years ago. As they work side by side to save the inn before the town's Christmas Inn Crawl, old feelings resurface alongside old memories, and Clara starts to wonder if she ran from Willow Creek for the wrong reasons entirely.
With a town that shows up before it's asked, a family finding its way back to each other, and a wishing well waiting for one more coin, Starlight & Peppermint is a heartwarming story about homecoming, second chances, and the kind of love that was patient enough to wait.
A wholesome, small-town holiday romance perfect for readers who love found-family warmth, hometown sweethearts, and a Christmas Eve worth believing in.