Guarded by Hollow Pine

My word is the one thing about me that can never be compromised. It's also, as of six days ago, the only thing standing between House Ashgrove and a region that's started quietly wondering if this territory still holds the way it used to.

I'm a Warden. I walk a place, I tell the truth about what I find, and every House within three territories trusts that word absolutely — because I have exactly one exception on my record, and it cost me nearly everything a Warden actually has. I do not intend to make a second one. Especially not with the Beta who invited me here himself, because he'd rather have my honest scrutiny than let rumor do the job badly.

Cade Sutter has spent his whole life being the steady one — the man who quietly fixes whatever's broken so no one else has to notice it was ever broken at all. He has never once let anyone take care of him in return. I wasn't planning to be the first. I definitely wasn't planning for the forced proximity of walking his entire territory with him, day after day, to turn into the thing that finally makes him ask for something back.

The trouble is, the deeper I get to know Hollow Pine — and him — the harder it gets to give the kind of clean, detached impression a Warden's supposed to give. And the deeper he lets me in, the more I understand exactly how much it costs a man like Cade to stop being useful for even a single moment and just be wanted.

Falling for him threatens the one thing that makes my word worth anything to anyone. Staying threatens the careful rootlessness that's kept me safe for years. I have to choose both honesty and him — and find out whether staying somewhere has to cost me everything, or whether I simply decided it would and never let myself find out.

Guarded by Hollow Pine is a high-heat, chosen mates paranormal romance with a forced-proximity, competence-kink spine, a caretaker hero who's never been let off duty, and a fiercely honest heroine learning that staying isn't the same as losing herself — HEA guaranteed.