Trusting Like a Fox
(2026)(The third book in the Sly Fox Creek Shifters series)
A novel by Heather Mayer
A small-town opposites attract romantic comedy featuring a human fraud examiner, an impossibly honest fox shifter mechanic, and one delightfully meddlesome Montana town.
She can spot a lie at forty paces. She never saw love coming.
April Freeson has spent eleven years catching liars for a living. Now she's hung her shingle in Sly Creek, Montana — population six hundred, all of them apparently insane — where her first client wants a once-missing garden gnome investigated for "returning better than it left," and her second client is a fox without an appointment.
Then there's the mechanic.
Allen Slytail is Sly Creek's mechanic, a fox shifter with an inconvenient habit of telling the truth. He doesn't invent repairs, pad invoices, or dodge difficult conversations.
Which, naturally, makes him the most suspicious man April has ever met. Nobody's that honest.
Determined to uncover what he's hiding, April opens a case file on Allen.
Big mistake.
Because while she's searching for evidence, Sly Creek keeps throwing them together—at festivals, in the garage, over coffee she never ordered, and through one suspiciously convenient mishap after another. The town seems oddly invested in their future, Allen refuses to stop being infuriatingly genuine, and every clue points toward the one conclusion April can't prove.
She isn't falling for a con. She's falling in love.
And that's one case no amount of evidence can solve.
Welcome to Sly Creek, where fox shifters fix more than engines, neighbors treat matchmaking like a civic duty, garden gnomes inspire investigations, and happily-ever-afters are everyone's favorite community project.
Perfect for readers who love:
She can spot a lie at forty paces. She never saw love coming.
April Freeson has spent eleven years catching liars for a living. Now she's hung her shingle in Sly Creek, Montana — population six hundred, all of them apparently insane — where her first client wants a once-missing garden gnome investigated for "returning better than it left," and her second client is a fox without an appointment.
Then there's the mechanic.
Allen Slytail is Sly Creek's mechanic, a fox shifter with an inconvenient habit of telling the truth. He doesn't invent repairs, pad invoices, or dodge difficult conversations.
Which, naturally, makes him the most suspicious man April has ever met. Nobody's that honest.
Determined to uncover what he's hiding, April opens a case file on Allen.
Big mistake.
Because while she's searching for evidence, Sly Creek keeps throwing them together—at festivals, in the garage, over coffee she never ordered, and through one suspiciously convenient mishap after another. The town seems oddly invested in their future, Allen refuses to stop being infuriatingly genuine, and every clue points toward the one conclusion April can't prove.
She isn't falling for a con. She's falling in love.
And that's one case no amount of evidence can solve.
Welcome to Sly Creek, where fox shifters fix more than engines, neighbors treat matchmaking like a civic duty, garden gnomes inspire investigations, and happily-ever-afters are everyone's favorite community project.
Perfect for readers who love:
- Small-town romantic comedies
Paranormal romance with fox shifters
Opposites attract
Human heroine × shifter hero
Cinnamon roll heroes
Slow-burn romance
Matchmaking townsfolk
Quirky small-town communities
Cozy mysteries without the murder
Fish-out-of-water heroines
Workplace romance
Found family
Laugh-out-loud banter
Humor with heart
Feel-good happily ever after
And, of course… garden gnomes.
Genre: Paranormal Romance