This time the arson isn't a crime — it's a business, and they have to walk in the front door to prove it.
Roan Holbrook reads burns for a living, but tonight he's in a suit, under chandeliers, at a charity gala where the man who profits off the ashes is shaking hands and calling it recovery. The Hearthstone Recovery Fund wears the clean face of a wildfire relief effort. Roan is here to prove what's underneath it.
Mara Ellison reads money, and standing in that ballroom she watches the whole machine turn in front of her: burn the land, win the no-bid rebuild, wash the cash through a fund built to help. Then her read goes cold and she tells Roan to pull back — and he goes in anyway.
Not a one-off crime. An industry.
He's right. She hates that he's right. But that's not what keeps her up. It's the way a helpful official smiled while he slid the one document that could clear their names into his own pocket — proof he was never on their side, learned too late, at the cost of a career she handed Roan the moment she followed him in.
They document the mechanism and get out on nerve alone. What they can't get back is the ground they just lost: there is no clean authority left in this county to run to. The fires don't fund a man. They fund the whole machine — and the machine just watched them from across the room.
The Recovery Fund is Episode 4 of Point of Origin, a high-velocity K-9 romantic-suspense serial — each episode a complete case you can finish in a sitting, each one turning the bigger fire a notch hotter. Two pros, maximum tension, closed door. For readers of Lori Ryan and Cristin Harber.
A new episode every week. Start the burn.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Roan Holbrook reads burns for a living, but tonight he's in a suit, under chandeliers, at a charity gala where the man who profits off the ashes is shaking hands and calling it recovery. The Hearthstone Recovery Fund wears the clean face of a wildfire relief effort. Roan is here to prove what's underneath it.
Mara Ellison reads money, and standing in that ballroom she watches the whole machine turn in front of her: burn the land, win the no-bid rebuild, wash the cash through a fund built to help. Then her read goes cold and she tells Roan to pull back — and he goes in anyway.
Not a one-off crime. An industry.
He's right. She hates that he's right. But that's not what keeps her up. It's the way a helpful official smiled while he slid the one document that could clear their names into his own pocket — proof he was never on their side, learned too late, at the cost of a career she handed Roan the moment she followed him in.
They document the mechanism and get out on nerve alone. What they can't get back is the ground they just lost: there is no clean authority left in this county to run to. The fires don't fund a man. They fund the whole machine — and the machine just watched them from across the room.
The Recovery Fund is Episode 4 of Point of Origin, a high-velocity K-9 romantic-suspense serial — each episode a complete case you can finish in a sitting, each one turning the bigger fire a notch hotter. Two pros, maximum tension, closed door. For readers of Lori Ryan and Cristin Harber.
A new episode every week. Start the burn.
Genre: Romantic Suspense