A cozy fall romance wrapped in small-town charm reunites the owner of a bed-and-breakfast with her childhood sweetheart for a celebrity matchmaking scheme which has them both seeing stars.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Matchmaker’s Cottage by Kat Sloane, which releases on August 11th 2026.
Julia Schaeffer might run the most romantic little bed-and-breakfast in Upstate New York, but as far as that infuriating Ethan Duchamp is concerned, this older, wiser Julia has a strict “no vacancy” policy. Sure, she’s teetering on the edge of a financial cliff, and his half-baked plan to pair up his celebrity clients at her inn will undoubtedly be good for business…but how much forced proximity with the man who abandoned her is she supposed to take?
Ethan needs this to work. The dreamy, autumnal—and blissfully secluded—cottage from his childhood summers is the ideal setting for playing matchmaker to Hollywood’s next power couple. It’s the only way to save his PR career from the tabloid toilet. He knew that the inn and Julia’s warm, comforting homemade touch would inspire real feelings—he just didn’t expect them to be his. Again.
But as old wounds reopen, and their connection rekindles, Julia and Ethan are forced to confront the truths they’ve both tried to bury. In a town where nothing stays hidden for long, they’ll have to decide if they can rebuild what was lost—or if their second chance will be derailed by scars that have yet to heal.
4
LIKE AN APPARITION—or a bad dream—Ethan Duchamp was on her property. Standing about ten feet in front of her. The closest he’d been in more than eight years.
He was clutching the handle of an expensive-looking suitcase in one hand, a gray blazer thrown over his opposite shoulder. The sleeves of his dress shirt were rolled up halfway, exposing tan forearms that she knew were dusted with light brown hair even if she couldn’t see them from her vantage point.
He looked the same, basically. Perhaps his shoulders were a bit broader, looking like he’d filled out more across the chest and torso, his hair a little longer, now brushed back from his forehead in neatly curated waves. The most telling difference was the beard. Julia had only ever known Ethan to be clean-shaven, even in middle school when all the boys were growing out bad mustaches or in those early college years when goatees had unfortunately been a thing. Ethan had always defied the facial hair trends, claiming nobody wanted to see his poor excuse for a beard anyway.
It wasn’t a poor excuse, though, Julia noted, trying to stay as dispassionate as possible. It was certainly not sparse or inadequate in any way, nor was it unruly or overlong. Instead, it gave the appearance of a man who took care of himself. Perhaps he had some sort of kit that he maintained it with. Certainly a brush of some sort. Maybe even an oil.
She almost laughed at the ludicrous direction of her thoughts. Here she was, confronted with this man she’d known almost all her life, minus the last decade, and all she could think of was the presumed maintenance of his facial hair.
It was sick. Deranged.
Were there hints of auburn in there?
Stop.
“Hi, Gem.”
Ah. There it was.
She’d noticed how he’d avoided using the nickname over the phone, although at the time she’d thought maybe he had almost said it right at the beginning of their conversation, the J sound of her name lingering a bit too long before ending in –ulia. It had been a small blessing, honestly, a reminder that they were no longer Ethan and Gem but instead were now strangers. And how it needed to stay that way, if only for her sanity and all the work she had done to forget how much he had meant to her once upon a time.
Except now—
Now the bastard had shown up, interrupted her from getting the pillowcases off the clothesline in a timely manner, made the goddamn wind stop itself dead, and then, to top it all off, he’d called her Gem.
Don’t call me that! she wanted to scream.
Instead, she responded: “Hi, Ethan.”
Excerpted from THE MATCHMAKER’S COTTAGE by Kat Sloane, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026
