Healed by Hollow Pine

Eleven years ago, Beckett Holt left Hollow Pine three weeks after his nineteenth birthday without so much as a goodbye, and I have spent every one of those years since making myself so useful to this town that no one would ever notice I was still waiting for him to walk back through my door.

Then he did. Boots on my porch, a job from Jack Ashgrove in his hand, and nowhere else in town left to put him but the room across the hall from my own — and the same scent that used to mean home to me at sixteen hit me so hard in that doorway I had to hold onto the frame, eleven years and every ounce of my own good sense doing absolutely nothing to brace me for it.

Something's been crossing Ashgrove's northern boundary — quiet at first, bolder by the week — and Beckett's the only tracker precise enough to read what it actually is before it gets close enough to hurt someone. I tell myself that's the only reason I let him stay. I tell myself a lot of things these days.

He left because staying meant being "the tracker's son" in a town that couldn't stop being gentle with him about his father's death. I left him waiting because the one time I let myself need someone completely, I learned exactly how fast an entire life can come apart in a doorway. We've both spent eleven years getting extremely good at surviving alone. Neither of us has any practice at this — at choosing to be known again, on purpose, by the one person who already has every reason not to trust it.

The boundary isn't the only thing closing in. Hollow Pine remembers the boy who vanished without a word, and trusting him a second time isn't something this town — or I — can just decide to do because he's finally home. He has to prove that coming back doesn't require arriving already fixed. I have to find out if asking to be needed back is really the danger I've spent eleven years convinced it is — or whether some part of both of us has known, since we were sixteen years old, exactly how this was always going to end.

Healed by Hollow Pine is a high-heat fated-mates paranormal romance with a second-chance homecoming spine, a tracker hero who's spent eleven years running from being needed, a heroine who's forgotten how to need anyone back, and a slow burn through one long winter toward the one thing neither of them let themselves ask for the first time — HEA guaranteed.