Bad Little Falls · Book Eight
Resting State
Dec & Owen · Koala / Hedgehog
Standalone, any order
Read free with Kindle Unlimited.
Dec Quinn keeps the hours. Owen Doyle keeps the commas.
Dec is a koala. He runs a 24-hour bookshop in Bad Little Falls, Maine, out of a Victorian his grandmother bought in 1978. He's awake six hours a day. He's been doing this alone for three years and the OPEN sign has not gone off in any of them.
Owen is a hedgehog. He's twenty-six. He's been ordering grammar reference books from Dec's online store at four in the morning for eight months and Dec has never seen him in person. Dec assumes he's some elderly pedant with a semicolon problem.
He is not.
When Owen finally shows up to sign for a first edition Fowler's, he trips over a hose coupling in the greenhouse, shifts into a hedgehog mid-fall, and self-anoints in eucalyptus while Dec watches from a tree. The bond hits them both at the same second. Neither of them runs.
What happens next is winter in Maine, two men who have made an art form out of being alone, and the slow discovery that the other one fits inside their hours. A cedar box built in a grandfather's workshop. Toast with vegemite. Margin notes in two handwritings. A mother in Australia who wants to know when she gets to meet him. A town that's been waiting months for this without being asked.
By April there's a boat going out of the garage for the first time in three years, and a harbor seal colony that's been on the same rock since 1887, and a man at the tiller who's been waiting his whole life to take someone he loves out to see them.
Resting State is Book 8 of the Bad Little Falls novellas. A cozy, funny, slow-burn omegaverse with fated mates, hibernation, knotting, and a guaranteed HEA. Standalone-friendly. Includes two bonus short stories: a Dec Quinn novelette at the front, and the opening chapter of Common Name (Bad Little Falls 9) at the back.
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
Includes the bonus short story Ailuridae. It is where Book Nine starts. It is reprinted at the front of Book Nine, so you can read them either way round. It opens with The Hours, the short from the back of Book Seven, so you have not missed anything if you started here.
