He was hired to guard her house. He never planned to lose his heart inside it.
Mara Voss rebuilt her life in Cedar Hollow one careful year at a time — a lakeside research station, a conservation nonprofit she trusts with her whole heart, and a hard-won quiet after the fraud case that nearly destroyed her. She testified. She won. She thought that chapter was closed.
She was wrong.
When someone starts dismantling her work piece by piece — sabotaged equipment, a break-in that leaves no fingerprints, a message that proves someone has been watching her sleep — Mara's board doesn't ask her opinion. They hire protection. And protection moves in.
Eli Calder doesn't do easy assignments. Ex-Army, allergic to attachment, and running a security firm on nothing but discipline, he's supposed to secure a perimeter, not fall for the woman inside it. But Mara isn't the fragile client his job description promised. She's sharp, stubborn, and hiding exactly how frightened she really is — which makes protecting her a lot harder than protecting her house.
As the threats escalate from warnings to something far more personal, Eli and Mara are forced into the kind of proximity that burns down every professional line he swore he'd hold. Somewhere between stakeouts and stolen mornings by the lake, trust becomes something neither of them meant to risk.
But the man rebuilding his revenge isn't finished — and he's closer than either of them knows. With the clock running out on Mara's last line of safety, Eli has one chance to prove that the thing he was hired to protect is the same thing he can't survive losing.
A fast-paced, twisty small-town suspense with a slow-burn romance and a ticking clock neither of them can outrun.