The Linden House

A Hadley Falls Romance — MM Contemporary Inheritance

by Jace Wilder

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Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Length: 149,000 words

Tropes: Forced Proximity • Inheritance • Slow Burn • Hurt/Comfort • Found Family • Grumpy/Sunshine • Small Town • Touch Starved • One Bed • They Met Once Before • Innkeeper Romance

Twenty-two years ago, on a porch in the rain, a stranger handed him a dishtowel. Tom remembered. Gabriel didn’t.

Gabriel Price has thirty days to bury his great-aunt Rose, settle her affairs, and get back to his life as a financial consultant in Boston. He shows up at the Linden House Inn in a charcoal Barbour with a return ticket and a brother in a hole, fully prepared to sell his half of the property to the first developer who blinks.

Then Marian Doyle reads the will. Aunt Rose left the inn jointly to Gabriel and the man who has lived in the carriage-house apartment and run the property for twenty-two years — Thomas Hale, forty-one, woodworker, recovering quiet, the closest thing Rose had to a son. The two of them have one full season to run the inn together. Memorial Day to Labor Day. No exceptions.

Tom doesn’t want a partner. Gabriel doesn’t want a summer. And neither of them is ready to admit that they’ve already met — once, on a porch swing in the rain in August 2003, when Gabriel was fourteen and Tom was twenty-four, and a single dishtowel changed both their lives.

By the third Tuesday in May, the orchard is asking for them. By the night of the storm, the suite is. And by the time Aunt Rose’s seventeenth journal reveals what she bet on twenty-two years ago, Gabriel has to decide whether the muscle memory of being a Price is bigger than the man who has been waiting for him on a porch since he was fourteen years old.

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

Slow-burn forced proximity that takes its time and earns every kiss
Quiet, capable woodworker heroes who say everything with their hands
Burned-out city men who learn how to be soft again
Found family at the kitchen island with a housekeeper who calls everyone “boys”
Dead matchmakers who plotted the whole thing from beyond the grave
Slow, devastating, full-eye-contact bedroom scenes
“I have wanted you in this apartment since 2003”
HEA with a wedding on a front porch and a wisteria that comes back

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⚠️ Content Notes

This book contains explicit on-page sex (5/5 heat), grief over the recent death of an elderly family member, references to a sibling’s gambling addiction and recovery, references to past emotional neglect from a parent during a teenage summer, and a brief on-page incident of unwanted attention at a wedding (resolved without violence). All sexual content is between consenting adult MCs. HEA guaranteed.

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Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One: The Drive Up

I came up the drive at six fifteen on a Tuesday in May.

The drive was a quarter mile of gravel between a row of sugar maples that had been planted, by my own count of Aunt Rose’s letters, in 1972, the year my great-uncle Henry had broken his hand setting them. The maples were full now. They had the small soft green of late May, and the gravel under the tires of the rental was the kind of gravel a person noticed when they had been driving on Boston blacktop for fifteen years and had not, in fifteen years, driven on gravel.

I noticed it.

I noticed it because I was looking for things to notice. I was looking for things to notice because if I noticed enough small specific things in a row, I could keep myself from noticing the larger, less specific thing, which was that I was driving up the gravel of a property that was, as of yesterday at noon at the offices of Marian Doyle, fifty percent mine.

The fifty percent had been a surprise.

The fifty percent had been a surprise because I had assumed, in advance of yesterday at noon, that I was going to be the hundred percent. I had assumed it because Aunt Rose had not, in any of her letters across thirty-six years, mentioned the existence of a co-heir. I had assumed it because my mother had not mentioned a co-heir at the funeral in November, and my brother Andrew had not mentioned a co-heir on the phone from a number I did not recognize last Friday at eleven, and Marian Doyle’s office had not, in advance of the appointment, mentioned a co-heir in any of the four letters it had sent me to my apartment in Back Bay over the past six months. The first I had heard of the co-heir was at twelve oh-four yesterday afternoon, in Marian Doyle’s office above the former hardware store on Main Street in Hadley Falls, when Marian Doyle had — at the count of four minutes into the meeting — said, very quietly, into the small careful steady silence she had been letting me sit in, the words —

Mr. Price, you are aware that your great-aunt has left the property jointly to you and Mr. Hale.

I had not been aware.

I had said, “I beg pardon?”

Marian Doyle had not, in any technical way, repeated herself. She had set down her pen on the small leather portfolio in front of her, and she had folded her hands on top of it, and she had looked at me across the desk in the way I would later learn was the way Marian Doyle looked at people, which was the small careful steady look of a woman who had been the only attorney in Hadley Falls for thirty-one years and had, by virtue of that count, learned to give people the room to take in a thing without filling the room with words.

I had taken in the thing.

I had taken it in by the small specific count of looking at the framed certificate behind Marian’s left shoulder — Vermont Bar Association, 1994 — and the small specific count of noticing the way the morning light came in through the window over Main Street at twelve oh-four on a Tuesday in May, and the small specific count of feeling, in my left jacket pocket, the small specific weight of my phone, which had been on silent since the funeral home at noon yesterday, and which had — by my own count — three voicemails from Andrew on it that I was not, in advance of yesterday at noon, going to listen to.

I had said, after the count, “Who is Mr. Hale.”

Marian Doyle had said, “Thomas Hale. Forty-one. Has lived in the carriage-house apartment on the property since 2003. Operated the inn alongside Mrs. Price-Hale since 2009. Has, by your great-aunt’s own description in the will, been the man who has ‘kept the property whole’ for the past seventeen years.”

I had said, “And he is — getting half.”

Marian Doyle had said, “He is, in fact, getting half. As are you. And the will is — Mr. Price, I am going to be direct with you about this, because the directness will, in the count of the next several minutes, save us both time — the will is structured in such a way that you are both required to be in residence at the property, jointly running the inn, for one full operating season — Memorial Day to Labor Day, this year — before either of you may sell, transfer, or develop your share. There are no exceptions to this clause. The clause was, by your great-aunt’s specific instruction, the clause she would not, under any conditions, allow me to soften.”

I had — at the count of twelve oh-six on a Tuesday in May, in Marian Doyle’s office above the former hardware store on Main Street in Hadley Falls — said —

“All right.”

That had been the start of yesterday.

Today was the drive up.

The inn came into view at the count of the third bend in the drive.

The Linden House had been, in every photograph I had ever seen of it, the same inn. White clapboard, two stories, a wide wraparound porch with a green-and-white painted railing, a black tin roof, three brick chimneys, six windows on the front of the second floor and four on the front of the first, and a small specific cedar trellis on the south side that had, in the photographs I had seen, been weighted with wisteria.

The wisteria, today, was not on the trellis.

The wisteria had, by the look of it from the gravel turnaround at the foot of the porch, half-died over the winter.

I did not know how I knew the wisteria had half-died. I had never, by my own count, looked at wisteria with any specific attention. I had grown up in a townhouse in Brookline that had no climbing plants, and I had lived for fifteen years in an apartment in Back Bay that had no plants at all, and I had not, in advance of the third bend in the gravel, considered myself a man who would, in the count of seven seconds, look at a trellis on the south side of an inn and assess the state of the wisteria on it.

I assessed it anyway.

The wisteria had half-died. The bottom three feet of the vine were brown and dry and had no leaves. The top three feet, near the roof line, had the small soft green of new shoots, which meant the plant was, in technical terms, alive, but which also meant it had been left, over the winter, without whatever a wisteria needed to keep its lower half going. I did not know what a wisteria needed to keep its lower half going. I made a small specific mental note to find out.

I parked the rental in the gravel turnaround.

I turned the engine off.

I sat in the rental for a count.

The count was long enough that the engine ticked itself cool, and the small specific quiet of the property at six twenty-one on a Tuesday in May settled over the rental, and the small specific quiet was — and I am putting this on the record because the quiet was the first thing about this property that mattered — the kind of quiet I had not been in for fifteen years.

I had not been in this kind of quiet because in Boston there was no quiet of this kind. Boston had a different quiet. Boston had the quiet of a hallway in a building with neighbors, or the quiet of a conference room before a meeting, or the quiet of a subway car at five in the morning. Boston did not have the quiet of a property at six twenty-one on a Tuesday in May with a stand of sugar maples down the drive and a half-dead wisteria on the south porch and a black tin roof and four hundred yards of orchard somewhere to the east.

I sat in the rental.

I let the quiet be the quiet.

I let myself, for the count of forty seconds, not think about the man who was somewhere on the property and who was, by Marian Doyle’s account, going to be on the property for the duration of the next ninety-six days, and who was, by Marian Doyle’s account, the man who had kept the property whole.

Then I got out of the rental.

I got my bag out of the back.

I went up the porch steps.

The front door was open.

The screen door was propped against the boot scraper.

The man at the back of the entry hall — at the count of fifteen feet from the front door, with a dish towel over his right shoulder, in a gray t-shirt and a pair of work jeans, with sawdust on his right forearm — looked up.

He held my look for a count.

He said, very quiet —

“Mr. Price.”

I said, “Mr. Hale.”

He said, “All right.”

That was the start.

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🔥 Bonus Chapter

The first nor’easter at the Linden House — six months after the wedding. Tom and Gabriel, three days alone in the inn, snowed in. Extra hot, extra slow, extra tender.

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