Bad Little Falls · Book Four
Reasonable Temperature
Shane & Hugh · Polar Bear / Walrus
Standalone, any order
Read free with Kindle Unlimited.
A Michelin-star chef. A police chief who bakes at 4 AM. A house at forty-eight degrees.
Hugh Barnett is a walrus, an omega, and the executive chef at one of Boston's best restaurants. He's also the new owner of a crumbling Victorian on a point in Bad Little Falls, Maine, inherited from a great-aunt who once told him he was too fat and put an apology in her will.
The house has no working stove, plumbing from 1894, and a radiator that sounds like a foghorn. It also has a police chief who drives past it twice a day and hasn't stopped.
Shane Haugen is a polar bear, an alpha, and the quietest man in town. He's maintained that house for six years. He knows where every valve is and which floorboards creak. He's been driving past it for three weeks and he hasn't stopped because stopping would require words and Shane doesn't have words for what he wants because Shane has never wanted anything.
Then a pipe bursts at 2 AM, Hugh calls the station, and Shane drives to Shore Road in three minutes instead of four.
The fated mate bond hits in the flooded basement. The heat follows. The town knows before breakfast.
Now there's a walrus building a twelve-seat auberge, a polar bear learning pastry, a Molteni range that arrives on a flatbed, a lobsterman with a napkin schedule, a Shiba Inu from Boston who has opinions about the thermostat, and a house that stays at forty-eight degrees because two arctic mammals don't need heat and the only person who complains is the peacock who shifted in the living room hoping to trigger a bond with someone, anyone, even though the only people home were two bonded mates and a very cold chef de cuisine.
The temperature is reasonable. It's always been reasonable.
Reasonable Temperature is a cozy, high-heat M/M omegaverse shifter romance with fated mates, knotting, small-town meddling, a competence fantasy in the kitchen, mpreg, and a guaranteed HEA. Fourth in the Bad Little Falls series. Includes a bonus short story and a prologue reprinting "The House on the Water."
What’s in it
Explicit and graphic, and short. Heats, ruts, knotting, and the plain words for all of it.
Cozy is the tone here, not the heat.
Omegaverse: fated mate bond, heats and ruts, knotting.
HEA guaranteed. No cliffhanger. Stands alone.
Content notes
None.
Nobody in Bad Little Falls is cruel and nobody punches down. That’s deliberate, and it holds across the whole series, not just this book.
If you screen for something specific, the series FAQ says what is and isn’t in these books.
Every way to read it
Books Four Through SixReasonable Temperature · Defense Mechanism · Convergent Evolution312 pp · 6×9 · paperback or hardcover, the only way to get this book in print
Includes the bonus short story The Flowers on the Counter. It is where Book Five starts. It is reprinted at the front of Book Five, so you can read them either way round. It opens with The House on the Water, the short from the back of Book Three, so you have not missed anything if you started here.
