The Miretide Vows Series by Kora Valeka

Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after. She came to the Miretide for the dead. She didn't expect the living to be this much trouble. Hester March is good with the dead. They stay where you put them. They don't bleed out in your arms the way the people you love do. She's traveled to the flood-channel settlement of Driftwake to identify bodies from a wrecked barge. Two weeks. No attachments. Then the waters rise early... moreEach book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after. She came to the Miretide for the dead. She didn't expect the living to be this much trouble. Hester March is good with the dead. They stay where you put them. They don't bleed out in your arms the way the people you love do. She's traveled to the flood-channel settlement of Driftwake to identify bodies from a wrecked barge. Two weeks. No attachments. Then the waters rise early. By local rite, an unbonded woman cannot sleep in the dead-house once the flood lanterns are lit. Tovek — the village's night-ferryman, broad as a doorway, scarred, and known for rowing into channels even other orcs won't touch — offers her a uthra-vow: a practical shelter arrangement, nothing more. Warmth. A roof. But Tovek's dominance isn't threats or titles. It's the fire already burning when she comes in from the cold. The food left where she'll find it. The way his scent — rainwood, river-mud, deep animal warmth — gets under her skin like a second conscience she cannot argue away. He lost his mate and child to flood season. His nest-room still has cradle-hooks in the ceiling. He has never taken them down. Hester has buried two women she loved. She knows exactly what wanting a family costs. She has the wound catalogued, labeled, and filed. She is still walking straight into it. One flood season. Two people who made careers out of carrying grief. How do you choose the living when you've only ever trusted the dead? less

Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after. She's spent three years making herself invisible. He paints people where everyone can see them. Iva Sorrel is very good at disappearing. After a charting error killed her brother and her guild used her grief to quietly erase her, she's learned the rules: take the restoration work, fix the damage, leave before anyone looks too closely... moreEach book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after. She's spent three years making herself invisible. He paints people where everyone can see them. Iva Sorrel is very good at disappearing. After a charting error killed her brother and her guild used her grief to quietly erase her, she's learned the rules: take the restoration work, fix the damage, leave before anyone looks too closely. She arrives in the reef-ring settlement of Brineshell expecting scaffolding and silence. She gets Mavrek. Brineshell's ritual tidepainter is enormous, ink-handed, and indecently certain. His job is to mark chosen mates in salt-oils and clan motifs before the entire community — so no one can mistake her for a secret, a shame, or a passing appetite. He looks at Iva like something worth making permanent. The problem: Mavrek will not love privately. He watched his human mother be loved quietly and honored nowhere, and he vowed he would never keep a woman's name out of his mouth in public. Iva can handle desire in the dark. She cannot handle reverence in daylight. Pigment-stained hands. Scent-rich oils. Praise she doesn't know how to survive. And then her old guild arrives, ready to fold her back into useful invisibility — back into the quiet erasure she's been calling safety. She has to decide: stay hidden, or step into the light — not because she's cornered, but because she refuses to give the people who erased her the last word. What does it cost to finally let someone paint you where the whole world can see? less

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... moreEach 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? less