Fisher Carpenter thought he knew what his life would look like. A successful career, a home in the city, a relationship built to last. But when it all falls apart, the only place that makes sense is his mountain cabin: quiet, remote, and safe from the ache of wanting too much.
Marty Pilcher has never had the luxury of playing it safe. Restless and running out of road, he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time, face-to-face with a man who has every reason to turn him away.
Hung by the Chimney with Care is a moody, slow-burn holiday romance about second chances, the fires we build against the cold, and the love we never see coming.
Fisher: I just saw myself in the rearview mirror. I looked tired. My eyes were red, and the dark circles weren’t doing me any favors either. Other than the bespoke suit I’d had made in London the last time I was there, my professional armor, I looked beaten. I certainly didn’t look like I was ready to give a presentation to the managing partners this morning. I didn’t look like I was ready to care about anything…
Marty: I held my breath and tried to think of anything besides my car dying on the side of the road in the middle of the desert. At night. It was already cold, and would only get colder, but I knew the heater would eat up whatever gas I had left in the tank so I shut it off. I reached behind me looking for a fleece, or a blanket to keep myself warm, but all I could find was an old UCLA sweatshirt I’d cut the sleeves off of. That wasn’t gonna help.
Some loves are worth breaking every rule for
Maxwell Heath lives in the shadows, slipping into dangerous lives, earning trust he doesn’t deserve, and walking away before anyone gets too close. His latest job should be no different: infiltrate a powerful man’s world, gather the intel, and vanish.
Then he meets Grayson Dunne.
One touch, one glance, and the mission shifts. What begins as manipulation turns into something raw and real, something Max never thought he’d risk everything for.
As the past closes in and the mission collapses, Max must decide what matters more: the life he’s fought to protect or the man he can’t let go.
Between the shadows and the light, he found the only thing worth staying for.
I never knew my Grandpa Pete. He dropped dead from a stroke a couple of years before I was born, not long after Momma and Pa got married. He was a pig farmer just like his father, and grandfather, before him. His family had worked the land we lived on for almost a century. It was his legacy. One of them.
His name wasn’t spoken much in our house, for what I’d eventually learn were obvious reasons. Pa called him that sonofabitch, while Momma didn’t mention him at all, except on the anniversary of his death, which she treated more like a celebration than a day of mourning. His death became a slow-burning fuse wrapped around all of our necks, setting off random explosions throughout our lives. Grandpa Pete did his damndest to kill each of us from beyond the grave.
As a kid, I didn’t understand what he’d done that was so bad. After all, we owed the farm to him. Momma was an only child, so it passed to her the day he died, which I’d later realize probably wasn’t her dream. But it gave us a lot. And there are worse things in life than a successful farm, especially in Choctaw, Oklahoma in the early nineties. I grew up thinking we were lucky. I was wrong.
The London Boys
They met on their first day of boarding school and their friendship will last a lifetime. One is a member of the reigning royal family, desperate to make his own name for himself in spite of his royal title; one is the only child of celebrated movie stars, lost and forgotten by those who should’ve watched out for him, in search of a new family to call his own; and the other comes from more humble beginnings, seemingly perfect in every way but harboring his own secrets. Together they will support each other as they each have to make hard choices as they grow from awkward boys into captivating, loving young men.
"The official name on my passport is Prince Caleb Clarke, which, of course, immediately sets me apart from the others if I’m trying to board an airplane. But that separateness is only due to who my family is. It was merely an accident of birth, the proverbial hand I was dealt. I would wither and die if anyone here at school seriously called me Your Royal Highness, despite what royal protocol might deem appropriate. That is not who I am."Frost on the Ground (bonus novella)
"For a long as I could remember, I was fascinated by the drovers and the life they led. Some didn’t stay long with us, some stayed on for years. They all had stories of life experiences that had brought them to the station that would captivate me for hours. Some sounded made up, they were that fantastical, but to an impressionable young teen it only made me idolize them more. It wasn’t long before I started to find other things about them fascinating as well. Things I knew I needed to keep to myself."
"The movies would have us all believe that once you find true love it’s nothing but blue skies and smooth sailing until you die peacefully, together, in bed, with perfectly coiffed grey hair, hers tumbling all around you on a silken pillow the colour of cornflowers. My parents made a bloody fortune perpetuating that hogswallop. Admittedly, I’m living off the spoils of their efforts, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know it’s all utter bullshit. Love doesn’t last forever. At least not for me. I’ve been in love a lot. I think."
"Someone, a former friend or a friend of a friend, once asked me if I thought it was weird that both of my best mates were gay. I told him that when you’re thirteen, you don’t make your friendships based on your differences, you make them on what you have in common. The differences we later discovered in ourselves only brought us closer together. We may’ve had diverse backgrounds, but our shared values, humour and lack of ego, that’s what brought us together. We never lacked for a proper laugh as we learned how to navigate through the world, together and on our own. The fact that they both ended up loving men, and not women, only made them more interesting, not less, and certainly not at all threatening to my own masculinity or heterosexuality. That’d be utter bollocks. It probably says more about them that they still wanted to be friends with me after I started dating girls. I was the oddball. Our bond has always, and will always, transcend that part of our lives. I’d still love them if they came to me and confessed murder. I’d probably even help them bury the bodies."The Lodge Brothers
In college they were roommates, living together in that old Victorian house just off campus that they nicknamed The Lodge. They shared everything with each other even while sometimes having to navigate the world on their own. School may’ve brought them together, but tragedy will bind them for life. They will take different roads to becoming men, but their common bonds will always remind them of who they once were and the choices they’ve had to make along the way to finding true happiness.
