Eleanor Whitfield teaches people which fork to use for a living. So naturally, she just inherited a honky-tonk bar.
Eleanor's etiquette studio in Atlanta is dying - six students, a stack of unpaid bills, and a legacy from her perfectionist mother that she can't afford to keep and can't bear to let go. Then a small-town lawyer calls with news that changes everything: her estranged great-aunt Mavis has left Eleanor her entire estate.
The catch? It's a bar called The Rusty Spur in a Blue Ridge Mountain town of 1,847 people. It has a disco ball, a mechanical bull, and peanut shells on the floor. And Eleanor has to live there for six months or lose it all.
She shows up in a pencil skirt and her mother's pearls. They serve her Chardonnay from a box. In a mason jar.
The staff includes a poetry-reading bouncer the size of a barn door, a waitress who's been there thirty years, and a bartender who performs on Friday nights in a vintage Dolly Parton t-shirt. And then there's Wyatt Rivers - the blue-eyed, broad-shouldered bar manager who loved Mavis like family and isn't sure Eleanor deserves any of this.
He might be right. She doesn't know how to pull a draft beer, she's never line danced, and she once corrected a customer's handshake technique in the middle of a Saturday night shift. But Mavis left her a letter that said something Eleanor can't stop thinking about: "A place to be graceless and still be loved."
When a developer comes after the bar with a multimillion-dollar offer, Eleanor has to decide what matters more - the safe, polished life she was raised to want, or the messy, loud, completely real one she's only just beginning to build.
✓ Fish out of water - etiquette expert meets honky-tonk chaos
✓ Opposites attract - her pearls, his tattoos ✓ Inheritance with strings attached
✓ Grumpy heroine / sunshine hero (yes, reversed)
✓ Found family in a small Southern town
✓ Ex-military hero with a heart of gold
✓ Forced proximity - she lives above the bar
✓ Meddling from beyond the grave
Heat Level: Just Kisses Tone: Funny, Heartfelt & Emotional Standalone HEA Guaranteed Clean romance, no explicit content
Perfect for readers who love Denise Hunter, Sherryl Woods, and heroines who discover that the most unpolished version of themselves was the best one all along.
