The Steel Beast’s Heart

Tropes: Friends to lovers, mutual pining, medic hero, hurt/comfort, danger brings them together, mini age gap (3 years), touch her and die, MC romance

Isla Mackenzie runs a wildlife rescue on the edge of Nightfall Cove. She left Seattle and corporate burnout behind to build something with her own hands, and she’s not in the market for company. Two-legged kind, anyway.

But for two years, a seven-foot minotaur has been showing up at her gate with injured animals in his arms.

Thomas Brooks doesn’t talk much. The club medic has a broken horn, wire-rimmed glasses, and a voice like gravel on silk, and he can’t remember the last time a woman looked at him without flinching. Isla never flinched. She hands him coffee and asks about the owl he brought her last month. She doesn’t know he’s been in love with her since the first spring thaw.

Then poachers put her on her knees in the mud with a bullet in her shoulder.

And the quiet minotaur who’s held his tongue for two years carries her home, lays her in his bed, and tells her he’s done pretending.

Steamy friends-to-lovers minotaur romance with two years of mutual pining that finally breaks open. Hurt/comfort, protector heat, and a quiet hero who has been waiting years to say it out loud. Guaranteed HEA.