Tamed by Hollow Pine
(2026)(The fifth book in the Wolves of Hollow Pine series)
A novel by June Parker
Griffin Cole has never once had a favorite. Not really — not in fifteen years of running the one tavern in Hollow Pine where every single person, rival or ally, stranger or lifelong regular, gets the exact same warmth the second they walk through his door. That's the whole point of the place. That's the whole point of him.
Then I walked in, tracked in mud from a season I didn't ask for, and felt precisely nothing.
I've watched a man's charm work on an entire town before. My father did it for eleven years, right up until it stopped mattering that my mother was the only person in the room he never actually saw. I know exactly what "easy to like" is worth, which is to say: nothing, if you can't tell the difference between being liked and being seen. I came to Hollow Pine to train House Ashgrove's horses for one season and leave the same way I arrived — untouched, unattached, contract end date already circled on my own calendar.
Griffin doesn't perform for the horses. He doesn't perform, period, the two or three times it actually matters — a fence fixed without being asked, a hand steady enough to calm a half-wild mare when nothing else will, a voice that drops half a register the instant he stops pretending. I start noticing the difference before I want to. I start wanting the difference before I'll admit it.
He's terrified that choosing one person, specifically, costs him the only thing that's never once let him down — being liked, a little, by everyone, always. I'm terrified that trusting this kind of warmth is exactly how my mother lost everything. Neither of us has ever tested what we're both this afraid of.
My contract has an end date. Griffin has a room that's never once closed, not for weather, not for grief, not for anything — until the one night he closes it anyway, publicly, in front of the whole town that's only ever known him as everyone's, to prove that I was never actually one of everyone at all. I have to decide whether I can trust a difference I can't verify from the outside. He has to find out whether being difficult, disappointing, and entirely mine is a risk worth more than being safely, permanently everyone's.
Tamed by Hollow Pine is a high-heat fated-mates paranormal romance with a reformed-charmer x immune-heroine spine, a tavern-keeper hero who's never once risked being someone's favourite on purpose, and a horse-trainer heroine relearning how to trust warmth that isn't a performance — HEA guaranteed.
For Fans Of:
Then I walked in, tracked in mud from a season I didn't ask for, and felt precisely nothing.
I've watched a man's charm work on an entire town before. My father did it for eleven years, right up until it stopped mattering that my mother was the only person in the room he never actually saw. I know exactly what "easy to like" is worth, which is to say: nothing, if you can't tell the difference between being liked and being seen. I came to Hollow Pine to train House Ashgrove's horses for one season and leave the same way I arrived — untouched, unattached, contract end date already circled on my own calendar.
Griffin doesn't perform for the horses. He doesn't perform, period, the two or three times it actually matters — a fence fixed without being asked, a hand steady enough to calm a half-wild mare when nothing else will, a voice that drops half a register the instant he stops pretending. I start noticing the difference before I want to. I start wanting the difference before I'll admit it.
He's terrified that choosing one person, specifically, costs him the only thing that's never once let him down — being liked, a little, by everyone, always. I'm terrified that trusting this kind of warmth is exactly how my mother lost everything. Neither of us has ever tested what we're both this afraid of.
My contract has an end date. Griffin has a room that's never once closed, not for weather, not for grief, not for anything — until the one night he closes it anyway, publicly, in front of the whole town that's only ever known him as everyone's, to prove that I was never actually one of everyone at all. I have to decide whether I can trust a difference I can't verify from the outside. He has to find out whether being difficult, disappointing, and entirely mine is a risk worth more than being safely, permanently everyone's.
Tamed by Hollow Pine is a high-heat fated-mates paranormal romance with a reformed-charmer x immune-heroine spine, a tavern-keeper hero who's never once risked being someone's favourite on purpose, and a horse-trainer heroine relearning how to trust warmth that isn't a performance — HEA guaranteed.
For Fans Of:
- Fated mates
Forced proximity
Werewolf tavern-keeper hero x traveling horse-trainer heroine
Small town romance
Grand public gesture
Parental-wound mirror
Found family
Dual POV, alternating first person
High heat / explicit content
Standalone HEA (connected series, not cliffhanger)
Genre: Paranormal Romance