First Taste

I licked one drop of honey off my own wrist, and the entire room dropped an octave.Wren Calloway came to Fenwick Hollow with a deed to a failing bakery, a decade of being used up in someone else's kitchen, and a stubborn plan to finally build a place no one could throw her out of. She did not plan on the beekeeper on the other side of her stone wall — Stellan Broud, who is well over six and a half feet of gruff silence, who hums low in his chest when she gets close, and who is not, it turns out, entirely a man.His body makes a nectar. Warm, golden, intoxicating. And the first deliberate taste, mouth to skin, is how his kind claims a mate — for life, on the hive's terms, no take-backs. Stellan has spent years making sure no one ever got close enough to be offered it.Then Wren licks a spilled drop off her own wrist, before he can stop her, before she knows what it means. His hum drops an octave across the whole room. And everything they've been carefully not-doing all spring comes apart at once.Now there's a binding neither of them chose the right way, a swarm-season rising early, and a question with no clean answer: did that taste count — and whose forever was it ever supposed to be?Cozy, comic, anatomy-specific, and explosively explicit.