Ashvale Press

Corvid's Reach sings at low tide so the marsh will sleep. Julienne Corbet inherits her mother's alto line the same week her brother disappears into the water. The lamplighter who finds her on the seawall died a century ago and still walks his rounds. The hymnbook's back pages list every voice the choir has fed to the flats, and the newest name is already inked. The choir says the salt keeps the town standing. Julienne is going to find out what the salt is being paid with, and she is going to change the arrangement - one line, sung backward, at the right tide.

Evelyn St. Clair traveled west to marry a cattle baron. He didn't show. Colt Barrett never wanted a society wife, but he can't break the contract without losing his ranch. He offers a compromise: stay three months as his housekeeper, and if she still wants him, he'll marry her. Evelyn agrees, but she's not the helpless girl he expected. She learns to cook, mend fences, and face down rustlers. Colt learns that the woman he abandoned at the altar is the only one who can save his land. A historical western marriage-in-crisis romance about two stubborn people who find love on the frontier.

Amelia Okonkwo has a spotless record, a first-choice attending in her corner, and a program director's wife who cannot stop matchmaking. When a famous visiting surgeon arrives and is instantly rumored to be her lover, she doesn't correct it. The other residents finally stop treating her like a favorite daughter. Dr. Liam Darcy did not come to New York to be a rumor. But a clean, stable, respected engagement to a serious resident is exactly the reputation he needs while his divorce settles. Six months, a pair of rings, no expectations. Then the coffee starts showing up on her early rounds. Then he starts telling her things. Then a medical error threatens them both, and telling the truth means risking everything they've built. Neither planned to stop pretending. Neither stops.

Ash Calder fixes bikes by day and runs errands for the Hellier Motorcycle Club by night. He was turned two years ago by a woman who got bored. He knows what he is. He keeps his teeth to himself and his hands on the wrenches. Apples Tompkins runs the diner the club calls neutral ground. She's known what Ash is for a year. They've got an arrangement: they don't say it out loud. Then a coastal club rolls into town and starts bleeding the drivers dry, and the Helliers give Ash two weeks to fix it, because he's the only member who can walk out of a bullet. Apples offers him her wrist at closing time so he doesn't have to hunt. Someone sees. They take her. They burn her diner down to the slab. Now Ash is riding through two roadblocks and a locked gate with everything he has left, and the one thing he will not do is stop.

Astoria Whitbourne has been a name on a plaque at Carrington College since she was twelve years old. She has never met the donor. She has never asked. Her final year, she is assigned to a closed seminar taught by the man whose foundation has paid for every book she has ever read. Twelve students. Fourteen weeks. One empty chair in the corner that no one sits in. Sebastian Reyes is forty-five, adjunct faculty for one term a year, and the reason she got to have a life. He has never told her. He is not planning to. When Astoria finds her own name four times over in the foundation's archive, she does not confront him. She hands in her final paper, an essay about what a gift costs the receiver, and leaves. Two years later, at a gala in a city neither of them lives in, he finds her by the coat check. He says something. So does she. Neither of them is sure, afterwards, who said the thing that changed it.

Wren Novak is the only woman on the desk and the only person who saw Cole Ashworth walk out with a duffel bag the night the SEC opened its investigation. He spent three months standing outside her apartment afterward. Now he's back, reinstated on a technicality, sitting at the desk next to hers, and the first thing he does is take her risk limit. Wren decides to make herself his problem. Cole decides to learn her schedule. She catches him doing it in the parking garage, and neither of them walks away. The firm is dirty and they both know it, and the only way to bring it down is to work together and not mean any of it. An enemies to lovers stalker workplace romance for readers who like their slow burn with a subpoena attached.

Nina Okonkwo has spent six months avoiding her ex, Detective Sam Reyes. Then the county fair's pie judge dies with a mouthful of Nina's lemon meringue, and suddenly they're forced to work together - unofficially, stubbornly, and a little too close for comfort. Between midnight stakeouts in the pie tent, feuding bakers, and forty-year-old recipe cards, Nina and Sam have to figure out who really wanted Rosalind Wexler dead. It was probably the pie. It was definitely not Nina. Probably. A warm, funny cozy murder mystery romance with more banter than a bake-off and a second chance worth waiting for.

The Volkov bratva owns Brighton Beach, and it owns Mara Sokolova's debts - every one of them, down to the last drop she's stolen from their own blood bank. When enforcer Kiril Volkov comes to collect, the fated-mate bond slams into place between a wolf who has never disobeyed and a thief who has never once stopped. Killing her is the clean answer. Hiding her is the one he chooses, and every lie after that is a nail in his own coffin. Mara doesn't want a mate. She wants her sister off the transplant list, and she'll bargain with a monster to get it. But the pakhan demands the claim be made publicly or not at all, and Kiril will have to tear through his own pack to keep her. Some bonds cost everything. Mara and Kiril pay it anyway - and end up with a one-bedroom in Bensonhurst and a Tuesday morning that neither of them expected to survive to see.

Rowan Bell comes back to Winslow Academy and finds out her roommate died over the summer. She goes to the funeral. She also goes to first period, where Barnard is sitting in her old seat, unharmed and complaining about the eggs. Barnard says she never died. The county says she did. So does another county, six years earlier. Rowan follows the paper trail to a secret society that has run Winslow for forty years - run by the debate captain, the lacrosse captain, and the archivist who has been recording every girl who ever disappeared. Rowan doesn't turn them in. She joins them, learns the machine, and brings back every name they buried. A sharp, dark reverse harem academy romance about a girl who read the fine print.

Two programs. One practice field. One very cold 6 a.m. Tenley Osei has been captain of the Carrowmore women's team for two seasons, and she has spent those seasons doing everything she can not to think about Jonas Brandt, the men's captain, who ended her sister's career with one tackle when they were seventeen and has never once said a word about it. Now a burst pipe has put both teams in the same building at the same hour, sharing a trainer, a weight room, and a hallway that is not wide enough for two people who are pretending not to know each other. They collide for three months. They argue in front of sixty people. They get suspended in the same week. And somewhere between the two buses and the gas-station parking lot, Tenley starts to consider the possibility that the apology she actually wants is not the one she has been asking for. A forced-proximity college sports romance about bad history, cold mornings, and the one person you cannot leave alone.

Nadia Karam maps coastlines for a living. She never expected to be mapped herself - until the Vlorë syndicate seizes her survey boat and locks her in the chart room of a rusting ferry with Enver Dushku, the man they send when they want something drawn a certain way. Eleven days. One storm. One man who brings her coffee before he brings her threats. Enver has his own reason for keeping the family's routes crooked, and it has nothing to do with the don. Every chart Nadia redraws pulls his brother further from the water. Every night they spend arguing over the same table pulls her further from the life she planned. When the order comes down to end her, Enver has one move left - and it costs him everything but her.

Geisterjägerin Erin Vance glaubt nicht an Geister. Doch als sie beauftragt wird, ein viktorianisches Herrenhaus zu untersuchen, sieht sie eine Gestalt im Spiegel - ein Mädchen, das ihr aufs Haar gleicht. Das Mädchen ertrank vor zwanzig Jahren. Ihr Name war ebenfalls Erin. Während die Spukerscheinungen zunehmen, deckt Erin ein dunkles Familiengeheimnis auf, das sie mit der ertrunkenen Erin und einem nie aufgeklärten Mord verbindet. Ein packender, atmosphärischer paranormaler Thriller über Schuld, Blut und die Geister, die nicht ruhen wollen.

Ana Petrova has a resume that says junior and a portfolio that says otherwise. What she doesn't have is a reason to trust Halden Voss, the fifty-one-year-old developer who bought her firm, her project, and - after one very long night in an unfinished penthouse - a lot more. He doesn't chase her. He doesn't explain himself. He doesn't even call. He just shows up at the pier dedication in the rain and puts the tower, and the decision, in her hands. A sizzling hot age gap billionaire boss romance about a woman who negotiates her own worth and a man who has to learn to be told no.

Isolde Harrow drowned in the marsh behind her husband's house. Her husband had her brought back anyway. Two months later she wakes in her own bed, in her own body, with every memory but one - she cannot remember loving Robert Harrow, or dying, or the water. The house treats her with immaculate politeness. His mother smiles too much. A binder comes calling for payment, and the price will not be money. Isolde starts asking questions about her own death and gets a different answer every time, until the answers start agreeing on the one thing that matters. She came back wrong, or she came back right, and either way someone is going to the marsh. A dark gothic romance of return, debt, and a very cool woman.

Adrian Voss bought her company. He already ruined her career once. Dani Reyes has spent three years keeping Halcyon Media independent from men like him - men who strip companies for parts and call it strategy. Now he owns the building, and he's put her in charge of the relaunch. Then he second-guesses her in front of the board. She drafts her resignation. He offers her forty-eight hours to prove the campaign. Then he gets in the car. They are snowed in. They are not professional. In the morning he says it won't happen again. It happens again. The relaunch hits and the board moves to gut the magazine arm anyway - the one thing he actually bought the company to save. He offers Dani a clean exit. She offers him a condition. Her name above his on the masthead. He signs.

Alessia Russo was raised to be an asset, and her father just sold her to the highest bidder. Salvatore Greco is forty-seven, Sicilian, and cold as the marble floors he walks on. He needed an American wife. He got one who reads his books better than his accountants do. Six weeks of separate bedrooms. Business dinners where he doesn't look at her. Then Alessia finds the money his own cousin has been stealing - and decides to hand it to Salvatore in front of the whole family. He doesn't say thank you. He takes her to bed instead, keeps her there for two days, and marries her a second time when she saves his life at the casino opening without flinching. An arranged marriage age gap mafia romance with a heroine who does not need saving and a don who learns to let her fight.

She charges salt for the crossing and keeps a ledger of every debt. Then the bridge starts to crack, and the only man who can fix it is one nobody in the river towns is allowed to forgive. Cece Mbeki has held the scrap bridge for three winters, and she has never once let it be taken from her. When the span fails under a grain wagon, she has one week and one option: Rhys Ashwright, a scarred metalworker who does not take jobs, does not talk about the past, and does not seem to be afraid of anything. She hires him. He stays for the welding. What neither of them plans is the winter they spend working side by side, or the night he tells her why he came out of the foundry at all - and why half the country wants him dead for it. When a militia colonel decides the bridge belongs to him, Cece has to choose between the structure she built and the man who made it stand. She has a ledger full of debts, a river full of towns who owe her, and the first reason in years to spend something she can't get back. A slow-burn post-apocalyptic romance about crossing fees, cold iron, and the kind of debt two people are glad to owe.

The Blackfir and Ridgeline packs have spent six generations fighting over a river that neither of them owns. Marisol Reyes, Blackfir's strategist, wrote the arbitration terms she knew both sides would reject. She did not account for the alpha on the other side of the table. Kade Carrow, Ridgeline's alpha, has kept his pack fed and armed for eleven years without asking anyone's permission. He has never been on the losing side of anything. He intends to lose nothing to a Blackfir strategist and her pretty treaty. Then their hands meet over the signing page, and something neither of them asked for moves through both bodies at once. Neither of them says it. The arbitration blows up, Marisol is shot in the crossfire, and Kade takes her across the river to keep her alive - which is technically a war crime, and functionally the closest thing either of them has to a neutral place. Three weeks. Two packs. One river nobody owns. And a proposal they will both have to lose something to sign. A fated mates, enemies to lovers shifter romance about two alphas who could only ever have built the peace together.

Nessa Callahan runs dispatch for the Iron Fangs and knows every route on the coast by heart. When the president dies and Rafael Vasquez takes the seat, the old men deliver an arrangement: marry the rival founder's daughter to seal the truce. Nessa doesn't want the truce, the ring, or the man. Rafael doesn't want a wife who knows where the bodies are. They marry in a back office with two witnesses and an enemy watching from the parking lot. The marriage becomes a standoff of logistics - she moves the routes an hour earlier to prove a point, he moves them back. Then a warehouse burns, and the buyer behind it isn't either family. It's a cartel front, and it has been inside their marriage the whole time. The fuel stop. The trunk. Six brothers riding out with no plan. Nessa walks home with the traitor's gun and the traitor's knee, and keeps her chair at the table. She didn't want a husband. She got a partner with an engine.

Briar Vance is nineteen, broke, and out of places to run. The only person who ever stood between her and her stepfather's fists rode out of Rockford when she was nine and never came back. She finds him anyway, at a motorcycle club on the wrong side of the river, a man the patch calls Crow - forty-one years old, grey at the temples, and the last person on earth who should want her. He takes her in because he owes her mother a debt he has been paying in monthly instalments for eight years. He gives her a room, a job, and one rule: nothing about him is hers. Briar breaks rules. She breaks this one slowly, on purpose, and by the time she learns what Crow did on that highway the night her mother died, she is already carrying his child and already in love with the man who owes her everything. She runs. He follows. Somewhere between the county line and Nevada, they have to decide whether the truth is worth losing the only family either of them has left.

Every hundred years the valley burns and the village gives a bride to the three who live under the hill. I volunteered because no one would miss me. I was wrong about what waits up here. Kesh, whose hands are always warm. Sable, whose mouth is stitched shut and who still tells me everything. Grey, who watches me with a hundred eyes and never blinks. They don't want a bride. They want a witness. I want answers. The fire is coming, the village is afraid, and the curse they carry was never theirs to begin with. I'm going to break it, even if I have to stand in the middle of it. Especially then.

I said yes to being a bridesmaid for a friend's three-day destination wedding. I did not read the fine print, which was that the groom's three younger brothers would be there. Karan, who I dated for seven weeks and never got a real breakup from. Rohan, who kissed me at a New Year's party in front of everyone and then ghosted me. Dev, who I'd never met and who somehow already knows the parts of me I don't show anyone. Then the monsoon came, and the road out flooded, and three days became six. We fought. We laughed. We got very good at sharing one cabana. I left with three phone numbers and no plans to use them. Reader, I used them. All three. I took a job in their city. I didn't tell them. They furnished a kitchen anyway.

Ich sagte Ja dazu, Trauzeugin auf einer dreitägigen Destination Wedding meiner Freundin zu sein. Was ich nicht gelesen hatte, war das Kleingedruckte: Die drei jüngeren Brüder des Bräutigams würden auch da sein. Karan, mit dem ich sieben Wochen zusammen war und von dem ich nie eine echte Trennung bekommen habe. Rohan, der mich auf einer Silvesterparty vor allen geküsst und mich dann geghostet hat. Dev, den ich nie getroffen habe und der trotzdem die Seiten an mir kennt, die ich niemandem zeige. Dann kam der Monsun, die Straße hinaus überflutete, und aus drei Tagen wurden sechs. Wir stritten. Wir lachten. Wir wurden sehr gut darin, uns eine Cabana zu teilen. Ich ging mit drei Telefonnummern und ohne Plan, sie zu benutzen. Liebe Leserin, ich habe sie benutzt. Alle drei. Ich nahm einen Job in ihrer Stadt an. Ich habe es ihnen nicht gesagt. Trotzdem haben sie eine Küche eingerichtet.

Dr. Sloane Okonkwo has spent four years proving Adrian Corde wrong. Now he's her boss, he's brilliant, and he's impossible - right up until his father is wheeled into her trauma bay with a bullet in his chest and a family name that explains everything. Adrian saves his father's life on the table. Sloane sees what no one else is supposed to see. Then his brother shows up in the parking garage with an envelope, and Adrian fires her to keep her out of it. Sloane doesn't stay out of it. She shows up at his apartment with the charts. She shows up at the family's hospital when the second shooting starts. She holds an artery shut with one hand while Adrian's brother screams at her over the bed. And at the end of it, the only thing Adrian has left to give her is the one thing he's never given anyone: his name off the family table.

The wolf court ended Wren Ashford's bloodline two generations ago. They missed one. When the new Alpha of the northern pack claims her as tribute, she goes expecting a collar - and gets a locked room only she has a key to. Rurik Halloran doesn't touch her, doesn't name her, doesn't explain. He needs her blood to hold a pack that's already fraying, and she needs his archives to prove her family was framed for the murder that started a war. They strike a bargain and keep striking them, one favor at a time, until the mate bond neither of them asked for gets named out loud. The councilor who framed her grandmother is still in the pack. The winter moot is coming. And the only way out for both of them is going to cost one of them the pack.

Ayo Bankole teaches cello on Tuesdays in the North End and plays second chair for the Boston Symphony, and she has a strict rule about knowing where her students' money comes from. Then a check arrives for four times a lesson's worth and she returns it in person, and meets Edoardo Moretti in the back room of a club he does not call a club. She does not take his money. She offers his daughter Saturdays, for free, in her own studio, and he says yes and never tells her why. Eight months later, Ayo knows the shape of a marriage from the outside. She knows the dates a bruise appears and disappears. She knows that the woman who brings her daughter to lessons is keeping a file. And she knows that the safest thing for everyone in this room is for her to walk out and not come back. She stays anyway. A BWWM interracial mafia romance.

Dominic Cattaneo lost his territory three years ago when his crew betrayed him. He has been living on the road, working as a mechanic, and staying out of the mafia's way. When the president of the Iron Serpents Motorcycle Club offers him a job, he takes it. The job is simple: protect the club's bookkeeper, a woman named Lena, from a rival family. Dominic doesn't know that Lena is the daughter of the man who betrayed him. He doesn't know that she has been looking for him for three years. When he finds out, he doesn't leave. He stays. Lena tells him the truth: her father is dying, and he wants to give Dominic his territory back. Dominic refuses. He doesn't want the territory. He wants Lena. They leave the city together. They don't go back. They run the club together instead.

Dominic Cattaneo hat vor drei Jahren sein Territorium verloren, als seine Crew ihn verriet. Seitdem lebt er auf der Straße, arbeitet als Mechaniker und hält sich von der Mafia fern. Als der Präsident der Iron Serpents Motorcycle Club ihm einen Job anbietet, nimmt er an. Der Job ist einfach: Beschütze die Buchhalterin des Clubs, eine Frau namens Lena, vor einer rivalisierenden Familie. Dominic weiß nicht, dass Lena die Tochter des Mannes ist, der ihn verraten hat. Er weiß nicht, dass sie ihn seit drei Jahren sucht. Als er es herausfindet, geht er nicht. Er bleibt. Lena sagt ihm die Wahrheit: Ihr Vater liegt im Sterben und will Dominic sein Territorium zurückgeben. Dominic lehnt ab. Er will das Territorium nicht. Er will Lena. Sie verlassen die Stadt zusammen. Sie gehen nicht zurück. Stattdessen führen sie den Club gemeinsam.

Nia Okafor was halfway through a suture when the light took her. She wakes in a curve of white steel orbiting a green planet, with a hundred frightened abductees and one alien doctor who refuses to lie to her. Surrahk was exiled for letting a human live. He has one chance to get everyone home, and it depends on the woman he can't keep his hands steady around. She'll run his clinic. He'll teach her a medicine three centuries past Earth's. Neither of them planned on the night shifts, the fever ward, or the way his pulse answers hers. When the slavers who own the ship come to reclaim their cargo, Surrahk is offered his old life back for the price of one human. He chooses the fire instead. A steamy alien doctor romance about the patient who saves the physician.

She found the ledger. He found her. Sofia Marchetti should be dead. Instead, Aleksei Volkov put his hand on her back, faced his men, and called her his fiancée. Now she's living in his house, wearing his ring, and pretending to be the woman who could bring the bratva down - because the man building the empire is the only thing standing between her and the people who want her buried. He thinks he's keeping her captive. She thinks she's gathering evidence. But every night in this house, the line between prisoner and partner gets thinner, and the man she's supposed to destroy keeps stepping in front of bullets meant for her. A dark, addictive mafia romance about the enemy you marry and the monster who turns out to be the shield.

Sofia Keller was hired to translate a legal meeting between the Vor and the German consulate. By the end of it, she'd heard the name of a man who was supposed to be dead, and everyone in the room knew she'd heard it. The Bratva sends Alexei Morozov to clean up the loose end. He finds her in a bookshop the next morning and offers her a different job: interpreter for his family - visible, safe, and testifying against no one. Sofia says yes because she has no other choice, and because he is the only person who has ever told her the truth about what he was going to do to her. For six months she translates interrogations and watches him spare everyone he can. Then the Vor orders a hit on a witness she likes, and she lies to his face. He catches her. It turns out the name she wasn't supposed to hear was his brother's, and Alexei has been protecting him ever since. They get the brother out. Sofia and Alexei leave together. The last page is quiet, and neither of them is flinching anymore.

Naya Adeyemi left Two Rivers at seventeen with a secret and no intention of ever coming back. She's back three days for her mother's funeral. She leaves Friday. Then the gas station on the ridge road, and Ronan Halvorsen - the alpha of the Two Rivers pack, who has spent eleven years believing his mother when she told him the baby was gone. Naya has a ten-year-old daughter. Effie has just started hearing the ridge in her sleep. A lycan shifter secret baby paranormal romance about a woman who will not be claimed, a daughter who cannot stop shifting, and an alpha who has to put his own mother off the ridge road before he can be anyone's father. Contains on-page heat.