She was stitching her own arm when he walked through the door. He decided she was his before she finished the suture.
Caroline Weston doesn’t need saving. As the only veterinarian in twenty miles of Carolina sandhills, she’s spent five years treating everything from military working dogs to injured livestock — alone, underfunded, and too stubborn to quit.But when she starts documenting a brutal dogfighting operation, the men behind it shoot her horse, slice her arm, and make it clear that curious women don’t survive in these hills.
Forge didn’t plan on finding her.
As sergeant at arms of the Black Ops Brotherhood — a motorcycle club forged from elite Special Forces veterans — he’s spent seventeen years maintaining weapons and checking for threats that never stop coming.He doesn’t let people in. Doesn’t trust anything he hasn’t personally inspected three times.Then he brings his dog to a backwoods vet clinic and finds a woman bleeding through her shirt who treats his German Shepherd before she treats herself.
He buries her horse. She doesn’t ask him to. He calls his brothers. She doesn’t ask for that either.
Someone is running blood sport through the Carolina sandhills — dogfights in tobacco barns, betting pools drawing violence from three states, and a disposal system for anything that stops being profitable.Caroline has the documentation to expose the operation.Forge has the brotherhood to destroy it.Together, they’re going to dismantle a criminal empire that’s been torturing animals and terrorizing families for decades.
But protecting Caroline means staying close. And staying close means confronting an attraction that hits harder than anything the Army ever threw at him.
She didn’t ask for his protection. He didn’t ask for permission.
Some threats you don’t negotiate with. Some women you don’t walk away from.
