Kept by Hollow Pine

I have never once bowed to a title in my life, and I am not about to start for a river-lord's heir with a signet ring and a mission he won't tell me about.

Julian Farrow walks into my family's general store looking like he wandered off a formal portrait — and looking, more specifically, like a man who has never once been told no. I tell him no about six things in the first ten minutes. He seems, infuriatingly, delighted by it.

He's here to smooth over what House Farrow's absence cost House Ashgrove after last year's scandal — a diplomatic errand, nothing more, the kind of thing an heir does before he inherits an entire House full of people who need things from him. I'm the one person in Hollow Pine with absolutely nothing to gain from his good opinion, which is apparently exactly why he can't stop finding reasons to be in my shop.

I've been left behind by someone from "that world" before. I know precisely how it ends when a man like Julian discovers exactly how far down the hierarchy I actually sit.

But Julian isn't interested in my hierarchy. He's interested in the fact that I'm the only person who's ever wanted him for something other than what his House can provide — and the closer we get, the more his own family makes clear exactly what choosing me will cost him.

He has to decide whether an heir can choose someone with nothing to offer his House at all. I have to decide whether letting myself be chosen, for real this time, is a risk I can survive taking twice.

Kept by Hollow Pine is a high-heat, chosen-not-fated paranormal romance with an enemies-to-lovers class-clash spine, a reserved hero learning to want something his House can't approve of, and a slow burn toward a commitment that isn't decided by any bond — HEA guaranteed.