Milked by the Grumpy Lumberjack

Juniper Calloway takes a cook's job at a logging camp three hours past the last stoplight for one reason: the pass closes for winter, and a closed road means nobody has to know what's wrong with her.

For two months she's been hiding a fullness under her ribs no doctor back home could explain - an unasked-for milk let-down that has nothing to do with pregnancy and everything to do with a body she can't get to stop. She manages it alone, at midnight, with a folded towel and sheer stubbornness. It works right up until the night it doesn't.

Camp foreman Gideon Voss has already buried one friend who said he was fine until the day he wasn't, and he isn't about to let his new cook make the same mistake. Gray at the temples, careful with his hands, and impossible to lie to, he's the one person at Bell River Camp who notices what everyone else misses. When Juniper finally tells him the truth, he doesn't flinch - he offers the one thing two months of towels never could. But he won't act on it until he's heard her say what she wants, out loud, more than once.

Every intimate scene in this book comes back to that same question, asked plainly: what do you want. The answer is always hers to give.

This complete, standalone short romance - no series commitment, no cliffhanger - is built around:

• A grumpy, quietly devoted age-gap hero whose gruffness is really just a man who notices everything and says little

• A heroine who's spent months carrying an unexplained physical condition alone, finally letting someone help

• An uncommon intimacy dynamic - regular relief with no pregnancy involved - grounded in explicit, repeated consent at every stage

• A forced-proximity, snowed-in setting where eleven buildings and thirty-one people are cut off from the outside world until spring

• Real stakes once the camp's absentee owner threatens to fire them both over what he's heard, and a hero forced to choose between protecting his job or standing by the woman he loves

• A hero's redemption arc, built on an old regret about a woman he once let go rather than risk his own position

• A found-family camp crew rooting for this couple the whole way through

• A full resolution: love declared, a proposal, a small camp wedding, and a spring epilogue that shows exactly where they land

Written for adult readers of age-gap, forced-proximity, and lactation-kink romance who want the specific dynamic they came for delivered inside a real, fully resolved story - not a fragment of one.

One winter. One camp. One grumpy foreman who never stops paying attention. Settle in and read the whole thing in an evening.