Salvage

She reads rivers for a living. He strips wrecks down to the frame. Neither one of them signed up to be salvageable.

Josephine Ward has spent twenty years running backcountry floats through canyon country most people don't know exists. She doesn't need town, doesn't need company, and she sure as hell doesn't need the quiet biker the Mother Road Renegades MC sent upriver to figure out how a poaching syndicate is gutting her territory.

Salvage doesn't talk much. Doesn't have to. The club's recovery specialist reads landscapes the way he reads wrecked machines—find the break, trace it back, strip out what's rotten. When his president sends him into the deep country to track a kill network operating in Renegade territory, he expects wire snares and game trails. He doesn't expect the river guide with sun-dark hands and a jaw set like canyon rock who tells him flatly that he's in her water and he'll run it her way or not at all.

He runs it her way.

But the syndicate isn't just poaching. The operation reaches deeper than trophy kills and black-market animal parts—into the county government, into the land itself, into a dead man's legacy that Josephine has been carrying alone for a decade. When the body count starts climbing and the man running it all decides the river guide is the last obstacle between him and everything he's built, Salvage stops being the quiet one.

Josephine has terms. She always has terms. This is alliance, not rescue. She'll share her river and stand in the smoke beside him, but she won't be kept safe in a compound while her canyon burns—not by the enemy, and not by the man who's claiming her one dock line at a time.

As the threat tightens and the canyon becomes a killing ground, Salvage and Josephine discover that the most dangerous thing in the deep country isn't the man trying to take the territory. It's what happens when a woman who's never needed anyone meets a man who's never been needed—and neither one of them can walk away.

Book 17 in the Mother Road Renegades MC series. Guaranteed HEA. No cliffhangers. No cheating.