The Winter Kings

THE WINTER KINGS

Dark Contemporary Romance — Contract Marriage / Family-Empire Romantic Suspense

3-Book Series • Frozen Adirondack Company Town • High-Heat • HEA

“Three brothers. One bank. A twenty-year debt written in ice.”

In the frozen company town of Sable Creek, the Creed brothers hold the ledger on every life in the valley — and Elias Thorne holds the match that burned their family twenty years ago. Ambrose, the banker who taught himself to want nothing. Caius, the enforcer who has guarded a woman from a corner booth for three years. Dorian, the smiling one who carries a ledger of names in a false-bottomed case.

Each Winter King meets the one woman who refuses to be a line item: a bookkeeper who walks into the wolf’s own office to price her own worth, a runaway painter living under a borrowed name, and the daughter of the enemy himself.

One couple per book. No cliffhangers. A hard-won happy ending in every volume.

Book One — Cold Collateral (Ambrose & Wren)

“She offered herself as collateral. He priced her three weeks before she ever crossed his mill yard.”

Sable Creek is a company town in the frozen Adirondacks, and one bank holds the paper on nearly every life in the valley. Thomas Halloran signed away his family’s inventory, the lease, and a personal note he cannot service in this life or the next. His sister keeps the books — and she knows there is exactly one asset the Creed bank has not already taken.

So Wren Halloran comes up the mill yard on foot, a leather ledger held against her chest like a shield, and offers Ambrose Creed a marriage of convenience: her name, her bookkeeping, and her presence, against the discharge of the Halloran debt. What she does not know is that federal examiners are already climbing the mountain, that the man across the desk has watched her walk that yard for three years without permitting himself the wanting, and that the ground she is standing on was prepared for her before she ever opened the door.

Inside a week she has found the depreciation line that would have handed the examiners the bank, a lien with her own name on it that her husband never mentioned, and a false panel with a dead man’s ruined ledger sealed behind it. And across the frozen lake, Elias Thorne — the man who broke the Creed patriarch with credit rather than force — is watching the marriage to see whether it will hold.

She has been her family’s collateral since she was sixteen. She has never once been chosen. And the only person in three counties who can read a syndicate’s two sets of books against each other is a bookkeeper who has stopped believing a word her husband says.

Alternating First Person (Ambrose & Wren) • HEA

Book Two — The Watcher’s Keep (Caius & Sylvie)

“He has guarded her from a corner booth for three years. Now he is taking her somewhere nobody can reach her.”

Everybody in Sable Creek knows the big man in the corner of the Sable Diner. He is the Creed family’s enforcer, and nobody in this valley asks him anything twice. What nobody knows is that Caius Creed has been in that booth at four-forty every morning for three years for one reason — and that he learned her real name inside the first winter and has never once said it out loud.

Sylvie Marsh keeps a bag half-packed, a false name, and a burn scar she has never let a living soul see. She paints at night with the shade down and turns the canvases to the wall, because a woman who leaves paintings leaves a trail. It works — right up until a stranger says the word Syracuse across her counter.

When two men shear the lock on her door in a whiteout, Caius kills them both and drives her to a lake house that appears on no map. Steel doors. Three deadbolts and an iron bar. And a wardrobe stocked with the exact sable brushes she used to buy in the city she fled. The man who burned her is out of prison and four miles south — but the thing closing in on Sylvie is also going up board by board inside the house, because the wall keeping her alive does not know the difference between what it keeps out and what it keeps in.

She has survived a locked door before. She is not going to survive another one — and the only man on this mountain who can save her is the one who built it.

Alternating First Person (Caius & Sylvie) • HEA

Book Three — The Reckoner’s Debt (Dorian & Verity)

“Everything about the charming guest in Room Forty is true — except his name. And he already owns every board of her lodge.”

The Lakeside Sanctuary is forty rooms of cedar and river stone at the top of a mountain road that closes in December. Verity Thorne bought it as a dying husk six years ago and has held it ever since by testing her own padlocks in the dark — because in the valley below, a Thorne is a Thorne, and her surname closes every honest door. The balloon on her mortgage comes due on the nineteenth. The lender is a name and a post box she has never heard breathe.

Dorian Ward is a corporate hospitality consultant with references that answer on the first ring. He is also the youngest of the three Creed brothers, and he has carried a ledger of names in a false-bottomed case for twelve years — every name struck through but one. Elias Thorne. Verity’s father. Under his name, in Dorian’s own ink, sits a single indented entry: the lodge, and the woman who built it.

Then the grid fails, the pass road goes out under six feet of snow, and the storm seals the creditor in with the debtor. Verity does not fold. She negotiates at knifepoint with frostbitten hands and refuses — flatly, repeatedly — to be rescued by anyone. Her father’s men are already in the treeline, and the one weapon on this mountain that could finish Elias Thorne is a ledger the two of them are now reading from opposite sides of the same desk.

“I’m done being saved,” she tells him. “That’s a cage with a nicer lock.” All three brothers, all three women, one table — before the last page.

Alternating First Person (Dorian & Verity) • HEA

Throughout All Three Books

Series Details

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What You Get

Three kings of a frozen valley. One ledger that decides who counts. ♥