Resting State: A M/M Omegaverse Shifter Romance (Bad Little Falls Book 8)

Dec Quinn keeps the hours. Owen Doyle keeps the commas.

Dec Quinn is a koala-shifter in a town full of shifters, which is not as unusual as it sounds if the town is Bad Little Falls. He runs a 24-hour bookshop out of a three-story Victorian on Dock Street, inherited from his grandmother, heated by a greenhouse his grandfather built for three eucalyptus trees that should not survive a Maine winter and have survived forty-five of them. Dec sleeps eighteen hours a day. He is awake for six. Those six are his. The shop is open all night because the sign says it is, and the sign has said so since 1978.

Owen Doyle is a hedgehog editor who has been ordering grammar reference books from Dec’s online store between three and five in the morning for eight months. Same rural route every time. Same nonfiction catalog. Same delivery window. Dec has never met him. Dec has shipped him eleven packages and has a working theory that O. Doyle is an elderly pedant with a semicolon problem.

Dec is wrong about all of it.

Owen is twenty-six, lives alone two miles out of town on his family’s property, and has been writing a dissertation about the comma splice in nineteenth-century naturalist prose that nobody, including him, is certain will ever be finished. He fights November every November. December tries to kill him. He does not date, does not socialize, and has been privately cataloging every time the koala’s OPEN sign comes on at four in the morning for months because somebody at the bookshop is awake when he is, and that fact has been keeping him company without his permission.

Then Owen shows up to collect a package at the worst possible moment, trips over a hose coupling in Dec’s greenhouse, shifts into a very small hedgehog, and self-anoints in eucalyptus while Dec watches from the tree above him. The omegaverse bond hits both of them at the same second. Neither of them is sure whether it was real. Neither of them is sure what to do next.

What follows is winter.

What follows is two men who have spent their adult lives managing solitude discovering, one quiet morning at a time, that the other one is in their hours. What follows is a cedar box built in a grandfather’s workshop. A manuscript getting edited at a kitchen table in handwriting instead of red pencil. A mother on FaceTime from Leura asking when she can meet him. A town that has been waiting for this for months without being asked. A first edition of Moby-Dick on a high shelf. Two cups by the kettle. A hedgehog with opinions about toast. A koala with opinions about commas. A harbor seal colony on a spring morning in a boat that has not been out of a garage in three years.

Winter does its work. The bond holds.

Resting State is a cozy, character-driven, high-heat M/M omegaverse shifter romance with fated mates, knotting, slow-burn domesticity, a hibernation subplot handled with care, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Eighth in the Bad Little Falls series. Can be read as a standalone. Includes a bonus Dec Quinn short story at the front and a bonus short story introducing the Common Name couple at the back.