Wild Hearts at War

I shut off the Haldanes' water at eight in the morning. By dark, Everett Haldane was standing in my headlights. I'm Maite Iturriaga. I can read a creek to the tenth of a cubic foot, and I can read a decree older than the state. Four generations of my family have irrigated off the oldest right on Lantern Creek, and I'm the water commissioner for the whole district. The one ditch I'm not allowed to administer is my own.
It's a dry year. The big ranch upstream is taking twice its share, and I put the state's lock on their gate with my own hands. The same afternoon, a certified letter tells me a Denver outfit has bought my dead father's note. I have ninety days to pay it. Everett Haldane runs twelve hundred acres for a father with a bad heart and a mortgage bigger than the cattle can carry. He has the headgate. He has a junior water right worth nothing in a drought.
He has a brother taking envelopes from a stranger in a white truck. He's the man who knelt in my ditch with his hands on my father's chest. He's also the man who mailed the lawyer's letter three weeks after we buried him. His trouble is simple. He fixes things instead of saying them. My senior water runs across his ground. My lost 1952 right needs nine hundred feet of ditch dug through his hay meadow.
And when the state calls the river and his cows start hauling water at nine cents a gallon, the only thing standing between his family and a sale is me. So I loan him water. On paper. On my terms. Two cubic feet per second. Measured twice a day, at six in the morning. Signed by both of us, every morning. He doesn't touch the gate. His father doesn't touch the gate. One drop over what's written, and I report him.
Six weeks of standing in the same water at dawn will do things to a rule. But the man in the white truck wants both our ranches, and he needs both our signatures to get them. Someone has a key to my lock. Someone has a match for my hay. And Everett knows something he isn't telling me. The number of days he keeps it will decide whether there's anything left between us to save. To keep me, a man who protects his people by keeping his mouth shut will have to tell the whole truth in front of the entire county, and ask for nothing.
The water is hers by law. The gate is on his land. A slow-burn, deeply emotional small-town cowboy romance featuring enemies to lovers, forced proximity, a feuding-families water war, found family, a real grovel, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Standalone. No cliffhanger. No cheating. Dual first-person POV. Open door. Open-door heat, on-page grief for a parent, and an arson fire with no animals harmed.
Content notes inside the front matter. First in time, first in right. Nobody wrote a law for the rest.