She joined Search and Rescue to rebuild herself, only to learn that the team leader is the ex who destroyed her first.
About Breaking The Fall
I lasted thirty seconds on the wall before my arms gave out. Now I'm lying in the ground, staring at the ceiling, and wondering if it might be easier to fake my own death instead.
Fired, broke, and humiliated, I moved back to the mountain town I swore I'd never return to. In an effort to reclaim some dignity and self-worth, I applied to the Crystal Lake Search and Rescue team. Now, as I lie in a heap on the ground, a familiar voice reaches me. The last voice I wanted to hear. Cole Harper.
He’s six feet of stubborn authority in a too-tight Henley, and the guy who dumped me the night before I left for Stanford without a single word of explanation.
Seven years later, he's broader, bossier, and absolutely impossible to ignore. And — can the universe get any crueler? — he's the team lead. Now I have to train under his command, trust him with my life on cliffside rescues and flash flood extractions, and pretend my pulse doesn't spike every time he calls me "Dee" in that low voice.
I came here to rebuild. Not to fall for the one person who broke me in the first place. But between the adrenaline and the overnight training missions, Cole is getting closer and my defenses are crumbling.
He's been keeping a secret since the night he let me go. And the truth is about to unravel everything I thought I knew about love, sacrifice, and what it really means to be enough.
The sharp wit and spice of Ali Hazelwood meets the action of Nora Roberts in this steamy second-chance romance about proving your worth and discovering you never had to.
The scariest thing he did was make her feel safe.
About Safer Ground
Name three things you can see.
A bluetick coonhound, pulling at her lead, disobedient and eager. The Sierra Nevada, with Jeffrey pines tracing the ridgelines like stitching. A man with the energy of an off-leash golden retriever, a rock climber's build, green eyes, and dimples that should be illegal.
Maybe I should stick to naming two things.
I rebuilt my life after surviving a marriage that nearly killed me. And I rebuilt it around the only relationship I needed — the one with myself. Autonomy and independence are everything to me now, and I finally have it: a dog training business, a quiet life in a mountain town, and an ex-husband behind bars.
So when Felix Whitaker shows up looking for help with a problematic but gifted bluetick coonhound named Topo —all tousled hair, flexing forearms, and a shirt doing absolutely nothing to hide those shoulders — I want to say no. I desperately need the money. But I don't trust myself around him. Because when he looks at me like that, my whole body says yes and my whole history says run.
And when my ex-husband finds me and forces us into hiding at a remote cabin in the backcountry, I lose the only defense I had. Distance.