Anvil

Sadie Hoke has a bag, a car, and her own name, and that is everything she took when she left a man who never once raised his voice and spent four years telling her she was too much.

She drives nine hours into the Arizona desert and stops at the only lit sign on a dead stretch of old Route 66: a sixteen-cabin motor court called the Lantern, where the neon hums, the coffee never stops, and there is one rule painted on a board behind the desk.

Sadie is curvy, quick, and done apologizing for the space she takes up. She takes the night shift, learns the ledger, and finds her place among women who run that motel on purpose.

Then a guest checks into cabin nine and disappears. His truck is gone. His bed was never slept in. His brass key is still on the board, and the register says he never checked out.

Nobody in that county believes the ledger. Nobody except Boone "Anvil" Ashby, the Moondogs MC's Enforcer: scarred hands, a voice he saves for when it counts, and a habit of watching the new night clerk like she is the only lit thing on that highway. He believes her out loud, in front of the whole club.

And the man she left shows up in her lot with a lawyer and a statement about her state of mind, and he hands it to the county and to the company buying the road.

A curvy night clerk, the club's most feared man, and one missing guest. A possessive biker who falls first and says so. Found family, forced proximity, protect-her-at-any-cost, small-town romantic suspense. High heat, open door, no fade to black: the sex is explicit and it is on the page.

Standalone motorcycle club romance. No cliffhanger. Guaranteed happily ever after.