Caldwell & Pike · Book One
Danger Close
Best in order
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Grant Caldwell and Jamie Pike gave the Army twenty years. Now they're out, newly married, and pointing two motorcycles west with nowhere to be and no one to answer to. The honeymoon they waited two decades to take. Then a travel center outside Amarillo. A carload of local boys who don't like the look of two men kissing. A college reporter with a camera and a year's worth of evidence nobody will touch.
It isn't their trouble. Jamie says so, out loud, more than once. A crooked county, a rich man's son moving poison through a dying town, a sheriff who buries every complaint that crosses his desk. None of it is theirs, and every mile of open road is pulling the other direction.
But the kid has nerve and no one in his corner, and Grant Caldwell has never in his life been able to ride past a wrong thing standing in the open. So they stay. They dig in. And the deeper they go, the clearer it gets that what's rotting this town is bigger and better-armed than one reckless boy with a story, and it has started to notice the two strangers helping him.
They've faced worse than a West Texas county, in places they can't name, back when the whole world was watching. Out here, no one is. That's the one advantage they've got left, and the one secret the Army never knew they carried: what they are when no one's watching.
They gave the Army twenty years and finally gave each other a wedding. Now thirty-eight, retired, and pointing two motorcycles at the open road for an endless honeymoon: m/m wolf-shifter romantic suspense with no fated mates and no pack, just two people with two decades of history. High heat, no cliffhangers, guaranteed HEA.
What’s in it
Explicit and graphic m/m sex, fully on the page, plain words and no fade to black. Never gratuitous. It is always doing a job.
Not omegaverse. Wolf shifters, established couple.
HEA guaranteed. No cliffhanger. Romantic suspense: there is a body count.
Content notes
This one is romantic suspense and it earns the suspense. On-page violence in keeping with the genre. Homophobia, including homophobic violence and slurs. A sexual assault of a secondary character, referenced and not depicted.
Grant and Jamie are married when the book opens and married when it closes. Nobody the book asks you to care about dies. Nobody cheats. Nobody breaks up.
The hunting
The leads are wolves and they hunt. They run down a yearling pronghorn on open grassland, kill it fast, and eat it, and it is on the page and it is not short.
Nothing else is hunted. No animal is hurt by a person. No dog is harmed anywhere in this book.
Specifics, with spoilers
The assault. Three secondary characters catch Jonathan's boyfriend Cole alone in a locker room and coerce him into oral sex, to send Jonathan a message. It happens a year before the book opens and it is not depicted. Jonathan says it out loud in chapter nine, and that is the only time it is described. Cole is alive, he is safe, and he and Jonathan are living together at the end of the book.
The violence. Both leads are taken. Jamie is shot through a kitchen wall, beaten, and a boot is put into the wound. Grant kills several armed men on the page, one with a knife and one by breaking his neck.
What does not happen. There are four young people in this book and not one of them is harmed. Nobody the book asks you to care about dies.
