Rule number one of running a botanical apothecary in a mountain town full of monsters: never let a six-foot-ten Highland Orc into your greenhouse when he’s holding a framing hammer.
At forty, I’m done trusting sleek corporate men in thousand-dollar suits. After blowing the whistle on my Boston biotech firm for rigging clinical trials—and watching my twenty-year research career go up in legal smoke—I packed my microscope, moved to the fog-wrapped sanctuary of Craghollow, Vermont, and opened The Moss & Mortar Apothecary. All I need is my cast-iron stove, forty crates of rare winter-blooming moon-orchids, and empirical data I can verify under a lens.
I definitely don’t need Torin Ashkeller eclipsing my grow lights.
Craghollow’s Master Timber-wright is three hundred and ten pounds of moss-green muscle, silver-capped lower tusks, and quiet, maddening competence. To outsiders, he’s an intimidating mountain giant with forearms the size of heritage cedar beams. To me? He’s the stoic, flannel-clad single uncle raising a chaotic ten-year-old nephew—and the man who secretly leaves hand-carved black-walnut herb-drying racks on my porch whenever I forget to eat lunch.
Then a Thanksgiving night blizzard shears a forty-pound spruce branch straight through Bay Four of my Victorian conservatory.
Before a single frost crystal can kill my life’s work, Torin scoops me off my stool, loads all forty crates of my temperamental orchids into his heated truck, and moves me into his custom-built red-cedar cabin for December. Now I’m sharing close timber-framed quarters with a gentle giant who builds humidified mahogany shelving for my plants at midnight, lets me tutor his tusked ten-year-old in chemistry, and rumbles low in his chest every time my freezing toes brush his calves.
When the pharmaceutical conglomerate I exposed sends a ruthless legal fixer to Craghollow to seize my nocturnal orchid cultivars, Torin doesn’t just rebuild my shattered glasshouse with hurricane-grade oak trusses—he stands in my doorway like a fortress wall.
I spent forty years believing the only safe variable was working alone. Turns out, my heart was just waiting for a master carpenter who knows how to build for a lifetime.
TIMBER & TUSKS is a standalone, full-length (64,700-word) cozy midlife monster romance in The Craghollow Sanctuary Series. Features a sharp-tongued 40-year-old botanist heroine, a 6'10" silver-tusked Highland Orc carpenter with an aggressive caretaking streak, snowed-in cabin forced proximity, single uncle / found family sweetness, competence porn, explicit open-door steam (Heat Level 4/5), and a guaranteed Happily Ever After with zero third-act breakup.