Keep the plot simple, but complicate everything else!
A group of kids go looking for a body. Residents of a small town gather stones and make ballots in preparation for an annual celebration. These are pretty straightforward set-ups…but there is nothing simple or easy about the stories they spawn. Moral quandaries and life lessons abound. For romance, you probably want to focus less on lessons and more on love—on the complexity of feelings, of passion, of relationships. Take tropes like forced proximity or enemies-to-lovers and heighten the tension, raise the emotional stakes. Alyssa Cole’s Be Not Afraid has two people on different sides of a conflict meeting over a dead body. As the story progresses, they have to weigh their sense of duty, their respective definitions of patriotism, against what they feel for each other. It’s an exquisite novella, and I highly recommend it!
Don’t sweat the HEA.
Now before you come after me with the pitchforks and torches, I don’t mean skip the happy ending. I mean that you don’t have to drag your story out just to shoehorn in an “I love you” or a marriage proposal or an epilogue featuring apple-cheeked babies. This is a short story. It’s a novella. You don’t have to cram all of that in there! Instead, get your characters to a place where they are a lock. They’re on the same page emotionally. Their relationship is solid. They have a future that the reader can believe in. At the core, an HEA means closing the book knowing these people are going to be okay. So, that’s the place to get your characters to—logically, comfortably, and within your word-count constraints.