The Wind-Reader's Claim (The Thornridge Fires #3)

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

She held the world together for twenty years. The world did not notice.

Margot Fell is forty-one. Eldest of five. She kept the shop open through her father's drinking, managed her sister's catastrophic marriage, bailed her brother out of debtors' prison twice, and nursed her mother through the final illness without missing a single day behind the counter. The shop is bankrupt. Her siblings have scattered. Not one of them has thought to ask if she needs anything — because Margot doesn't need anything. That is the foundational fact of the Fell family.

She takes a wool-buying contract on the Thornridge because the pay is good and the altitude is far from everyone she has ever rescued. She wants solitude. Honest work. No one requiring one more bloody thing.

She is not prepared for Ulvek.

High Cairn's wind-reader is the quietest orc she has ever encountered — still as a cliff face, patient as deep water — and his form of tenderness is wordless and specific. He wraps things. A blanket around her shoulders when the wind shifts and she hasn't noticed. Fur around her feet when she falls asleep at the counting table. A wool-stuffed hand-warmer pressed into her palm before she's registered the cold. He does not ask if she needs anything. He simply covers her, the way a wind-reader covers a fire to keep it alive through a gale.

The fire-share bond forms through shared survival at altitude. His wind-scrubbed stone and lanolin scent working into her bones. And somewhere between the third letter from Gwen and the second from Rodel — each with the same unspoken come back, fix it, you always fix it — Margot sits down at Ulvek's fire and cries.

For the first time in twenty years, someone covers her without being asked.

Can the load-bearing wall learn to lean?