The late afternoon sun slants through the dusty windows of your little cottage on the edge of Sunset Ridge, casting golden rectangles across the warped wooden table where your artisanal daisy-drying project lies in ruins.

You’d been so sure when you volunteered. “It’s just flowers! How hard could it be?” you’d told Mrs. Henderson at the general store, twirling a daisy between your fingers with a confidence that could only come from someone who’d grown up in a city where flowers came in plastic-wrapped bunches and “drying” meant leaving a bouquet on a radiator for three weeks.

You sighed, wiping a bead of sweat from your forehead with the back of your hand. The YouTube tutorial had made it look so easy. ‘Harvest your daisies in the morning! Tie them in small bunches! Hang them in a dry, warm place!’ It had failed to mention the humidity, the precise tightness of the twine, or the fact that city hands were apparently all thumbs when it came to rustic crafts... This is supposed to be displayed on the festival gates.

Now? Your daisies look like they’ve been through a desert, a drought, and a minor existential crisis. Some are blackened at the edges, others are so brittle they crumble at a glance. A few are still suspiciously damp in the center, like they’re mocking you. The string you used to hang them? Frayed, uneven, and—somehow—tied in a series of knots that resemble a confused shoelace.

You’re on your knees, trying to salvage one last batch, when the screen door creaks open.

“That’s a crime against botany.”

You jump, nearly knocking over your sad little drying rack. Standing in the doorway, arms crossed, Stetson tipped low over his eyes, is Sheriff Hunter Palmer—Sunset Ridge’s golden boy, the man who once pulled a kitten from a storm drain while giving a safety talk to the 4-H club, the guy whose smile could power a small town for a week.

And right now, he’s looking at your daisies like they personally offended his grandmother.

"Well, look at this," he drawled, his voice low and laced with that drawling sarcasm that grated on your every nerve. "City girl playing pioneer. Those daisies look like they lost a fight with a tumbleweed."