Stories

The Montana sky is wide, coffee strong, and wounded souls are never turned away from Two Spirits Horse Ranch. When Jake finds a young stranger left for dead at the north gate, his promise to protect him draws the whole ranch into a fight against fear, memory, and the men who might return to finish what they started. Warm, funny, tender, and suspenseful, In the Barb is a Western romance about found family, survival, and the kind of love that begins as rescue but grows into home.

"You can never trust a Crawley." Those were Albert Cooley's words to his sons, spoken every chance he got, and August did his best to do what was expected of him after his ma passed. The Crawleys and the Cooleys were ranching families, and they didn't mix, not ever, but more and more, August had a problem with letting his father decide everything for him. Was Fletcher really his enemy? Could he trust the man he'd butted heads with over and over, one he'd known pretty much his whole life? All he knew for certain was he was tired of all the conflict, and needed his life to change before he exploded. That's where his Gran came in.

Martin is still feeling the effects of an acrimonious divorce and more recently the death of his mother.

He receives an email that could be a scam. It triggers events that upend just about everything Martin believes about himself. His path forward is not going to be smooth. Can he navigate this new life to make friends, find love and reestablish a family?

Marcus Valerius Pulcher, a Roman noble raised on music rather than war, is sent to Germania’s raw frontier under the ambitious governor Varus. There he meets Ingomar, a Cherusci warrior, and finds something neither of them has words for, something a cithara, a hidden grove, and two empires’ worth of duty were never meant to allow.

But peace on this frontier is a fragile, borrowed thing. Warnings go unheeded. Confidence curdles into catastrophe. And as history’s most infamous ambush gathers in the forest ahead, Marcus and Ingomar must decide what love is actually worth paying for.

After a strange anticlimactic kidnapping, Axel Graysen is pulled into the tumultuous world of the Wook Family. Axel treats Jeha Wook’s gunshot wound and ends up treating the oddly large team of brothers who work for Jeha. The problem is that Jeha’s people seem like delinquents, and Jeha is the largest delinquent. Axel worries about keeping the man he likes from getting hurt again.

To his family, Matt is just the dorky, mustached dad. The men he meets see the body underneath, and the switch that flips behind closed doors. Three days, five encounters, one Parents Weekend.

A story to be published in whole in five parts.

Felix has a system. Ryder is a system error. When a missing student and a slice of stolen treacle tart turn Felix into the school's most feared warlock, Ryder decides he's running a scam—and he's going to prove it. But the more Ryder follows him, the more Felix's rigid world unravels. Dark Academia has never been this ridiculous, and falling in love has never been this chaotic. A gay rom-com about luck, lies, and the absolute disaster of being seen.

Two high school enemies—a lanky anxious nerd and a brooding bully—end up stuck together working the closing shift at a dead-end grocery store. As summer bleeds away and college looms, they discover the social hierarchy means nothing when you're both scraping gum off linoleum. But when a rainstorm strands them at the bully's rundown apartment, Chad discovers Jake's deepest secret: he's a massive closet geek with a decade of hidden longing. What starts as reluctant friendship becomes something far more complicated—and far more real—than either expected.

After Gettysburg, the War settled into a brutal stalemate. Then, the war took an unexpected turn: General Grant was found dead. At first, this appeared to be a grim accident. But papers discovered at the scene told a darker story—conspiracy, foreign interests, powerful financiers, and the highest circles of government, tied together by a single missing ledger. Little is noted of the rain-soaked cadets from Virginia stumbling upon Grant’s party, other than they were there. But behind that account lay a frantic hunt to recover the ledger before its contents could expose those willing to reshape nations from the shadows.

When a straight guy accidentally comes out as gay at work, the sudden attention is too good to lose. To keep the act going, he asks his straight-passing best bro to pose as his boyfriend for the company gala. It’s a foolproof plan that can’t go wrong—until it does.

A complete story in three parts.