The Lavender Contract

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She came to buy the rarest lavender in France. His grandmother only sells to family. So they got engaged. New York perfumer Avery Lindell has built the best fragrance of her life around a single vial of lavender essence from a hill village in Provence. There is a note in it nobody can find anywhere else on earth: cold and bright, like a mountain after lightning. Now her company wants the whole field, and ten years of harvests besides. The field belongs to the Aubanels. Luc Aubanel is proud, exhausted, and hiding a bank letter from his eighty-eight-year-old grandmother. And Marcelline Aubanel has sold her lavender to nobody outside the family for fifty years. So Luc proposes. Not for real. Three weeks, a borrowed ring, and a village that believes every word. Then, on the night of Bastille Day, the family distillery burns to the ground, and every drop of this year's essence goes with it. Avery's secret formula turns up in a rival Paris perfume. A press release from New York tells the whole world the engagement was a deal. And the only one on the plateau who seems to have seen through them from the start is a goat. The Lavender Contract is a fake-engagement summer romance with a real mystery: a pétanque tournament with a family recipe at stake, fireworks over a ruined castle, a nose that can smell a lie, and a grandmother who has been watching faces across a pitch since 1961. For readers who want: • A fake relationship that turns real, and has to pay for the lie • A mystery solved by smell, a pencil and a stubborn goat • Provence in July: lavender, heat, a village square and Quatorze Juillet • A grandmother who is always one move ahead • A happy ending that has to be earned A standalone novel with a happy ending. Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A fire on the page, no one hurt.