When historic-restoration mason Margot Hale takes a contract to save a crumbling clocktower in a fog-wrapped town that isn't on any map, she never expects the building to be the one keeping watch over her.
It is. Bram is a granite-skinned gargoyle sentinel who's guarded the tower for two centuries, running scorching hot under all that cold stone and he wakes the moment Margot's bare hands touch his walls. Their first morning on the scaffold turns dust-covered and dangerously charged, and when a violent storm strands them together in the tower's fog-lit hall, forced proximity gives way to a claiming that neither of them can walk back from. As slick outsider Vic Vance buys up the waterfront and turns Margot's newcomer status into leverage, the dying fog that woke Bram starts killing him too - and saving him means Margot has to do the one thing she's built her whole life around avoiding: choose a place, out loud, and stay.
From the scaffold to the storm-lashed hall to the rubble of a collapsed roof to a stolen morning in the old vestry, their grumpy x grumpy, forced-proximity romance battles a town-wide magic crisis and the rival circling it, with cameos from the whole Mist Hollow crew (a bakery power couple, a dry-witted archivist, a fog-touched mural pair). Packed with size-difference steam, weight and pinning, possessive "mine," and a guardian who's never once been chosen for himself, this standalone HEA sets up a spicy ensemble series still climbing.
High heat cozy monster romance - grumpy mason x grumpy gargoyle. Forced proximity, size difference, possessive praise. Happily ever after guaranteed.
Content warnings available in front matter 18+
