The Marshherd's Hearth (The Miretide Vows #3)

Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.

She's been useful her whole life. She's done being useful.

Tilda Vane is thirty-five and completely out of places to go. She's nursed a father who left her nothing, raised half-siblings who took the house she kept alive, and worked for a merchant family who discarded her the moment their youngest outgrew needing her. Now she takes a six-month contract on Milkfen Isle — decent wages, a room with a lock — because no more dependencies is the only plan she has.

Borruk is not the plan.

Milkfen's chief herdsman is mud-scarred, massive, nearly silent, and obeyed by rut-mad marsh aurochs that would gore almost anyone else. But his dominance is domestic. He notices skipped meals. Notices fatigue. Notices how Tilda thanks people as if apologizing for existing — and he recognizes it, because he spent his childhood traded between households for his usefulness, never for himself.

On Milkfen, the milk hearth is sacred. If a woman regularly eats at a man's hearth, sleeps under his roof, receives his winter stores — he is not merely hosting her. He is courting.

Tilda converts every kindness into labor she can repay. Borruk counters with food, warmth, scent-marked linens, and a rough, reverent hunger that makes her feel wanted in places she'd written off as dead.

Then her family reappears, expecting her back. One more household. One more woman who doesn't say no.

Is this the life she was managed into — or the one she's finally brave enough to take?