All’s Fair in Love and Lawnmowers
Sapphic Small-Town Romance
by Blair Lennox
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Small Town, Grumpy/Sunshine, Age Gap, Praise Kink, Inheritance Romance, Renovation Romance, Touch Starved
She inherited a garden. She didn’t plan on inheriting the woman who’d been keeping it alive.
Rory Bell, 33, inherits her grandmother’s historic Victorian house in the aggressively charming village of Rosewood Hollow.
Then she meets the complication. Sloane Hart, 42, owner of Hart & Soil Landscaping, the woman who’s been maintaining her grandmother’s legendary rose garden for free since the funeral. Sloane is bossy, gorgeous, maddeningly competent, and determined to save a heritage collection that Rory can’t tell apart from the weeds.
They have thirty days to restore the garden for the annual Garden Walk — the only path to a preservation grant that could save the house. Neither agrees to fall in love while covered in mud.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Grumpy landscaper x chaotic city girl sapphic romance
✅ Enemies to lovers with a 30-day deadline
✅ Age gap with competence-as-foreplay energy
✅ Praise kink that starts in the garden and ends in the bedroom
✅ “She bought a second mug before she could admit she wanted company”
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, depictions of grief and burnout, and themes of self-doubt and emotional avoidance. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Chapter One: Deadheading Home
The welcome sign for Rosewood Hollow had been repainted since the last time I’d driven past it, which meant someone in this town had voluntarily spent a Saturday hand-lettering “Where Every Season Blooms!” in forest green on a slab of reclaimed barn wood, and not a single person had stopped them.
I tightened my grip on the rental car’s steering wheel and tried not to feel anything about that.
It was late May and the valley was doing its thing — rolling green hills stitched together with stone walls, orchards frothing white with late blossoms, the lake glinting silver through breaks in the trees. A farm stand appeared on the left with a chalkboard sign that read RHUBARB IS HERE AND SO IS JESUS.
I hated that my chest ached looking at it. That was inconvenient and unhelpful and I shoved it into the same internal drawer where I kept my feelings about my dead grandmother, my dead career, and the fact that I’d eaten gas station beef jerky for two of my last three meals.
The Bell house sat at the end of a dead-end road, behind a low stone wall that my grandmother had been irrationally proud of. The wall was still there. Everything else had gone to hell.
It looked like a haunted Victorian postcard. Three stories of once-white clapboard, now peeling in long strips that curled like old parchment. The front door — the door my grandmother had painted robin’s-egg blue every spring for forty years — was faded to the color of a bruise.
My grandmother’s yard had been famous. Not figuratively famous — actually, genuinely, written-up-in-Hudson Valley Magazine famous. Now it looked like nature had declared war and won decisively.
“Cool,” I said to no one. “Great job, Rory. Really nailing the responsible-adult thing.”
The key stuck in the lock. I jiggled it the way Grandma Evelyn had taught me — lift and twist, don’t force it, this house responds to patience, not pressure — and the door swung open. Inside: dust. And the kitchen still smelled like lemon and rosemary. I stood in the middle of the kitchen and cried. Not long. Maybe ninety seconds.
A rustling sound came from the hedge. A woman emerged. She was tall — five-ten at least, dark blond hair, faded tattoos, cargo pants, work boots, and she was holding pruning shears.
“You let the Maiden’s Blush go unpruned for an entire season,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who are you, and what is a Maiden’s Blush?”
Her jaw tightened. “It’s a two-hundred-year-old rose variety. And I’m the person who kept it alive while you were in Manhattan pretending this house didn’t exist.”
“Well,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you too. I’m Rory. And I’m going to need you to point those shears somewhere else before we continue this conversation.”
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The Second Porch Chair — The night Sloane moves in, they christen every room in their house.
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