At forty-four, my life philosophy was simple: double-entry bookkeeping never lies, and a woman should never co-sign anything with a man who has horns.
After divorcing my corporate ex-husband and surviving an SEC deposition, I bought The Copper Kettle Tavern & Inn in Craghollow, Vermont, to live a quiet life governed strictly by spreadsheets and balanced variance columns.
Then a New Year’s Eve boiler explosion flooded my cellar—and uncovered an unrecorded 1926 municipal mortgage lien.
The sole holder of the co-signed agricultural debt? Callum Thorne.
He stands seven-foot-four in his heavy orchard boots, weighs three hundred and sixty pounds, and sports two sweeping bronze horns that scrape the tavern lintels. He’s also the town’s solitary master mead-maker—and for six months, he has been systematically driving me insane by delivering ninety-five-dollar reserve clover mead, billing me for table cider, and sneaking warm honeycomb squares into my coat pockets.
Now the town trust is threatening to auction my inn to a corporate resort developer unless Callum and I settle the covenant before the spring thaw.
Callum’s proposed solution? A temporary joint homestead marriage of convenience.
He says it’s just pragmatic tax mitigation so I can audit his orchard depreciation schedules while he rebuilds my tavern boiler. But when a seven-foot-four cinnamon-roll minotaur carries you through a snowbank, cooks you three-course honey-glazed breakfasts, and looks at you like you’re the sweetest harvest on the mountain, balancing the ledger becomes dangerously complicated.
HONEY & HORNS is a standalone, full-length (62,100-word) cozy midlife monster romance and the trilogy finale to The Craghollow Sanctuary Series. Features a sharp, sarcastic 44-year-old forensic auditor heroine, a 7'4" bronze-horned Minotaur orchardist who courts via honeycomb and acts of service, marriage of convenience, forced proximity, worshipful size difference, explicit open-door steam (Heat Level 4/5), and a guaranteed Happily Ever After with zero third-act breakup.