“Some vows are signed. Others are answered — like a call at 3 a.m.”
North Fork Valley, Idaho: one snowed-in county, a thousand head of livestock, two struggling veterinary clinics, and never enough hands. Here the winter is a working antagonist — black ice, whiteouts, frozen equipment, 3 a.m. calving calls — and the deadlier predator wears a gray suit.
As VetCore’s fixer works the valley’s debts with retention clauses and “final” notices, the people who keep the county’s animals alive learn that lone-hero endurance is just a slower way of losing.
Told in intimate close-up, these are romances where competence is courtship and paperwork can kill. The heroes are capable and quietly wrecked; the heroines are more capable and done being anyone’s instrument. In North Fork, love isn’t declared. It’s answered, like a call at 3 a.m.
Book One — Hard Pull (Imogen Frey & Owen Boyd)
“He gives her one season. She plans to take the county.”
Owen Boyd is the last large-animal vet in North Fork Valley, running his dead father’s practice on cold coffee, split knuckles, and a bank notice he refuses to open. Then Imogen Frey rolls into town with a mobile surgical suite, a board certification, and her grandfather’s name on the shuttered clinic two blocks from his. The line they draw down the county map is supposed to keep the peace — until black ice, blizzards, and animals that should have died keep dragging them to the same side of it.
Every save earns a grudging inch of respect; every near-miss burns hotter than the last. But winter isn’t the only predator working the valley. A gray-suited fixer from VetCore is circling both their ledgers, betting that debt will do what competition couldn’t. When pride drives Owen back into going it alone — and the alliance ruptures on the worst night of the freeze — everything they’ve built together lands on the auction block with the rest of his father’s legacy.
Hard Pull is rivals-to-lovers at its most work-worn and tender: two proud, capable professionals learning that surviving the county was never a solo call. It ends with a co-op vote, two names on one door, and a partnership signed in far more than ink.
Alternating First Person (Owen & Imogen) • HEA
Book Two — Vital Signs (Tilly Abara & Micah Boyd)
“He’s loved her for years in covered shifts and clean sutures. She’s hidden her whole future in a gym bag. Neither will say it first.”
Tilly Abara can run the North Fork Valley Clinic through a blizzard and a boardroom ambush without smudging her ink. What she can’t do is admit what’s in her gym bag: a pathology textbook, years of midnight study, and the dream she shelved at nineteen to keep her family fed. Micah Boyd — the clinic’s quiet surgeon — already knows. He’s loved her in the only language he trusts: covered shifts, clean sutures, and a letter he’s never let her read, locked in his bottom drawer.
Then the gray suit comes back. VetCore’s fixer returns to the valley with liens, protocol audits, and a scholarship offer that would put Tilly’s name on a diploma — four years and a mountain range away. Micah starts packing her boxes like it’s a kindness, because asking her to stay would be selfish. Wouldn’t it? As a quarantine locks the clinic down and the corporate noose tightens, the silence between them stops being safe — and starts costing patients, the practice, and the last honest thing either of them owns.
Vital Signs is slow-burn pining at its most restrained and devastating — love practiced daily and never spoken, witnessed from the dispatch desk by the woman who has been logging every tell for years. It ends with an exam passed, a letter finally read, and two more names painted on the sign.
First Person — Observer Narrator (Gemma Abara-Frey) • HEA
Series Tropes
Series Details
Heat Level
What You Get
$243 (R4,000) $121 (R2,000)
1 in stock
