Mesquite's Flame

She told them to go to hell. They came back with a crowbar.

Shelby Wade built Wade's Smokehouse from nothing — a converted school bus, her grandmother's dry rub recipe, and the stubborn refusal to answer to anyone. Five years of serving brisket at oil field lots and construction sites across South Texas, and she's never missed a day, never backed down from a roughneck, and never paid a dime she didn't owe.

Then Oscar Fuentes decides she owes him.

Route fees. Two hundred a week for the privilege of parking on public land. When Shelby tells his enforcers where to shove it, they slash her tires, smash her windows, and show her photographs of her grandmother's house — the room she sleeps in, the neighbor she has coffee with on Tuesdays. Pay up, or the old woman has an accident.

Mesquite is the road captain of the Ghosts of the Alamo MC, and he's been eating Shelby's brisket since she was parking at day-labor corners. When she drives through the compound gate on two flat tires with fury in her eyes and fear in her hands, he doesn't ask questions. He fixes the tires, opens the gate, and starts planning the kind of run that doesn't end with a handshake.

Shelby doesn't want to be rescued. She wants her truck, her routes, and her grandmother left the hell alone. What she gets is a road captain who looks at her like she's worth burning down a smuggling empire for — and a war that's going to test whether a woman with a backbone and a man with a map can protect everything they're building before Fuentes turns it to ash.

Mesquite's Flame is Book 3 in the Ghosts of the Alamo MC series. Full-length MC romance. Complete standalone with a guaranteed HEA.