My van died in his driveway the day of my grandfather's will reading, and I put it in reverse straight through his fence instead. He almost had it towed with me still inside it. Six-foot-something of soot and silence, guarding the one forge his father ever bothered to leave him like it's the only inheritance that didn't come with an apology attached. He keeps a chalk tally of every day we don't kill each other and a marriage clause with ninety days on the clock, the one inheritance condition his grandfather ever wrote that actually worked. I'm the one who proposed marriage in his own gravel yard like it was a business merger. I never meant to mean it back. He calls it a business arrangement with a ring attached. I call it the way he watches me across the forge like he's already lost an argument he never let me hear him have. One late night at the forge, sparks still in the air and his hands closing over mine on the hammer, and I stop pretending either of us is only in this for the paperwork. But wait. He's spent his whole life believing his father's leaving proves love is just another business deal that eventually goes under, and the forge is the only promise he's ever trusted to keep. He doesn't think he's earned the right to be chosen for real, not after watching his father walk out on the same forge he's now betting everything on. I'm the woman whose last fiancé walked off with her business and her ability to trust her own judgment, and a fraud lawsuit with a ninety-day countdown is about to drag every one of my old emails into a courtroom to prove it. He says love is just another business arrangement someone eventually walks out on. He says the safest thing for both of us is letting this marriage end exactly the way it started, on paper. Dot just keeps showing up anyway, refills my coffee before I ask for it, and never once says I told you so, even when she clearly did. The night he finally shows me the second ring, the one he forged in secret and never meant for anyone else to see, he looks at me like it costs him something just to let me hold it. I do not hand it back. He was not surprised. This grumpy, guarded, impossible man is tearing down every wall he built the day his father decided a forge was easier to love than a family. I drove through his fence once by accident. I am not about to let a lawsuit and a countdown clock talk him out of the one thing neither of us signed up for and both of us get to keep. Grumpy Blacksmith's Marriage Clause is a steamy standalone small-town romance with a marriage of convenience that stops being convenient, a heroine who refuses to let one lawsuit decide her worth, a wounded hero worth the wait, one deeply unbothered goat, and a guaranteed happily-ever-after. No cheating. No cliffhangers.
