The Falconer's Fire (The Thornridge Fires #1)
Kora Valeka
Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.
She's been fine for three years. Don't ask her to prove it.
Brynn Lacey goes where she's needed, fixes what's broken, and leaves before anyone can look at her long enough to notice the cracks. She's a traveling herbalist. She smiles at everyone's children. She jokes when the altitude headaches come. She does not talk about the daughter she delivered alone — stillborn, silent, in a roadside inn — and she never will. She is fine.
Then she climbs to Crest Morrow to treat a master falconer's prize raptor, and she meets Drashek.
He's enormous. Quiet. Scar-handed and devastatingly attentive. He trains wild birds through patience alone — no hoods, no force, no demands. Trust built through offering, never taking. And when he looks at Brynn with that same slow, steady attention — past the herbalist's chatter, past the easy jokes, past the woman who feeds everyone before herself — she feels something worse than fear.
Recognition.
The fire-share bond forms without her permission. His smoke and raptor-musk seeping into her hair, her skin, her lungs. Her scent settling into his hearthstones before she ever names what's happening. And Drashek will not pretend she's fine. Will not participate in the lie. He keeps the fire going, sets food beside her without asking, and waits — patient, relentless, utterly unbearable — for the performance to crack.
A mountain storm is coming. So is three years of grief she has never let herself feel.
How long can a woman keep running when the fire is already inside her?
