Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster's Secret

My fresh start rolled into town in a broken-down U-Haul, two eight-year-old twins in the back seat, and exactly eleven minutes to convince a stranger to hire me.

He almost said no.<BR>Six-foot-something of scarred, silent ex-military, running a brewery like it's the only thing that's never once left him.<BR>He keeps his receipts in a shoebox and a legal pad of every reason a relationship like this one won't work.<BR>I fixed the first one. I never meant to go looking for the second.<BR>He calls it a professional arrangement. I call it the way he watches me across a room like he already lost an argument he never let me hear him have.<BR>One night snowed in together in a loft he's never once let another living soul into, and I stop pretending either of us believes that anymore.<BR>But wait.<BR>He's been quietly supporting his dead best friend's family for six years, anonymous, under a name that isn't his.<BR>He doesn't think he's earned the right to be forgiven for the reason why.<BR>My ex-husband isn't finished with me either, and every time Rafe steps between us, he digs the hole he's convinced he belongs in a little deeper.<BR>He says love is just a longer way of losing someone.<BR>He says the safest thing he can do for my kids is disappear before they need him to stay.<BR>He just keeps showing up anyway, fixes what neither of us asked him to fix, and never once asks for the credit.<BR>The night he finally told me about the ridge, and why he comes up here every year to say the truth out loud to a view instead of a person, he looked at me like it cost him something just to let me hear it. I did not look away.<BR>He was not surprised.<BR>This grieving, guarded, impossible man is tearing down every wall he built the day he decided guilt was safer than love.<BR>>Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster's Secret is a steamy standalone small-town romance with a slow-burn grump, a heroine who saves herself, a wounded hero worth the wait, two scene-stealing twins, and a guaranteed happily-ever-after. No cheating. No cliffhangers.