A Fire Worth Keeping

Edric Vane left the war with a discharge paper, somebody else's boots, and nowhere in particular to be. The letter found him anyway: an inheritance from a man he'd never met, a half-dead inn in a port town called Whiteport, and thirty days to prove it worth keeping before the debt collector takes it instead.

The inn comes with a tenant nobody warned him about. Ash has been bound to Hearthlight's chimney for centuries, starving on neglect, furious about his nickname, and — against every rule a dying hearth spirit is supposed to follow — still burning. He's been waiting. He just wasn't sure for whom until Edric walked in.

Thalia arrives to assess the wreck as a job, not a future. She's spent two centuries building a reputation on being right about hearths, and she didn't plan on being wrong about this one, or about the soldier learning to tend a fire with more patience than she expected from a man his age. Isabel shows up next, turned away everywhere else in town for the crime of being good at her work while being a woman — and Edric does the one thing nobody else bothered to: he just lets her cook.

Rebuilding Hearthlight should be the hard part. Blood apparently disagrees. Someone with the Dunmoor name has just noticed the inn is worth something again, and she didn't come back for a reunion.

In this book

• A grumpy, centuries-old hearth spirit with zero chill about his nickname
• A hero who earns his household one patched roof at a time
• A slow-burn (sorry) romance that waits for ask, not assume
• A cozy fantasy world where the real magic is showing up