rescue romance - Stories

Nearly divorced and miserable, twenty-five-year-old Wyatt Whitaker is a self-destructive force to be reckoned with. Fresh out of vet school, he’s already stretched thin between building his practice, helping his little brother cope with PTSD, and an inability to say no to anything that needs saving.

Taking in a gay nineteen-year-old-runaway he nearly ran over in a rainstorm shouldn’t complicate any of that.

Right?

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.

When a blizzard traps Arthur and the mall's chaotic security guard Flip in a dark, freezing apartment, they expect a night of awkward small talk. What they don't expect is the electric tension that's been building across the concourse for months—or the discovery that Flip's not as straight as he thought. Two days of forced proximity, instant coffee, and improvised fires spark something neither can ignore. But when the snow stops, Flip has a choice: walk away, or risk everything for the man who made him feel seen for the first time.

Website designer Scottie Ness is taking a well-deserved vacation from the grindstone, and he plans to spend it in the solitude of Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest around Mt. Adams. He’s prepared for everything—except the lightning storm that traps him in a wildfire. Or meeting Jax Quintero, an abrasive firefighter whose bulky uniform couldn't hide a jawline chiseled from stone and intense eyes that burned him with scorn. Or was that the flames surrounding them?

Maybe Scottie should have gone to Hawaii on vacation instead.

I endured years of experiments at the hands of sadistic aliens. Barely eighteen, I've been rescued from the tiny cell and the years of enforced sensory deprivation. Lost, with no family or friends I can remember or would turn to if I could, I'm alone in the universe... except for the humans who saved me. The Captain. Zeke. Doc. A crew of misfit Rangers, a ragtag bunch operating just this side of legal--and often on the other side when circumstances are right--are not the kind to help someone “like me” recover. Captain wants to send me away, but I can't leave. No one else can touch me.

He's it for me, the strength I can't function without.