Come for Me

He came with an ultimatum.
She showed him everything that was wrong with his territory in the first hour.
It went from there.

Zara Morrow has been managing Cascade Pack land since she was eighteen. She knows every boundary marker, every drainage pattern, every structural problem on six miles of territory - including the ones on the other side of the line. She's been watching the Ridgeline territory for three years. She knows exactly what's wrong with it.

When Rafe Santos arrives as the Ridgeline's new Alpha with an ultimatum for Declan Morrow, Zara has exactly one reaction: to tell him, immediately, the four things that are wrong with his land.

He takes all four as information.

No defensiveness. No management. Just: thank you, can you show me?

Zara has been told she's a lot. She's been told her directness is too much. She's watched five people have the moment where they stopped finding her charming and started finding her confronting.

Rafe Santos does not have the moment.

What he has is forty hours of research done before their first meeting, a willingness to redirect a drainage channel in his own territory based on her recommendation, and the specific patience of a man who understands that land takes time and so does everything else worth building.

Six months of land management work. A two-hundred-year-old shelter between their territories. A bond that built like a Cascade winter - slowly, specifically, until the day it was fully there.

Come For Me is a steamy rivals-to-lovers fated mates romance featuring a heroine who says what's there and a hero who hears it as information. Also featuring: drainage channels, structural assessments, and the most romantic use of granite stone in the Pacific Northwest.

Series: The Cascade Pack, Book Three - standalone HEA, no cliffhanger
Heat level: Explicit
Tropes: Rivals to lovers, fated mates, slow burn, alpha hero, engineer heroine, land management as foreplay (genuinely)