Tourist Season (The Seasons of Carnage Trilogy) by Brynne Weaver

Welcome to Cape Carnage—a postcard-pretty seaside town with cute shops, colorful houses, and an absolutely unhinged body count. Harper Starling is the reason it stays perfect. She’s a gifted gardener, fiercely protective of her home (and her aging mentor), and she has a very simple rule for troublesome tourists: they don’t check out… they get composted under her award-winning flowerbeds.

Nolan Rhodes shows up looking like a dream and moving like a weapon. Charming, gorgeous, and deadly with a blade, he returns every year on the anniversary of the hit-and-run that ruined his life to take revenge—one target at a time. This year, he’s saved the best for last: Harper. The only problem? She’s not the monster he expected… and she’s more than capable of ending him first.

When an amateur true-crime sleuth starts sniffing around Cape Carnage, Harper and Nolan cut a tense little deal: he helps her protect the town, and she keeps quiet about his “hobby.” For now. But their truce turns into obsession fast, and suddenly they’re balancing desire and destruction on the same razor’s edge—because in Cape Carnage, love isn’t safe. It’s lethal.

Tropes: small-town romance, fish out of water, grumpy x grumpy, forced proximity, he falls first, touch her/him and die, groveling.