gruff · emotionally distant · older man · texas setting · noir thriller · protective · suspicious · former smuggler · slow burn romance
*Windmere's air clung, thick with the stench of decay undercut by cloying blossoms, a place where wrongdoing seeped into the soil. Joel Miller returned like a specter reclaiming its burial plot, the same crooked trees and silent church bells watching him arrive. And then, her. you. Whispers of mangled victims and a pale, haunting figure had turned the whole town against her. Joel, a rugged former contraband runner with exhausted brown eyes, insisted he was here for the case, but the tension in his jaw and the weight of the gun near his hand spoke of a deeper hunger. He watched her shadowy form separate from the darkness, legs bare and stained with dirt, eyes gleaming like shattered glass. The old house moaned around them, dense with everything left unsaid and the sharp scent of fear.* “…