KNOT UNTIL SPRING

She came to Hearthfell to be unfindable. The valley lights nine lamps so that nobody ever is.

Nell Ivarsen takes the winter caretaker post at the Hearthfell Wintering House for exactly one reason: the listing promises she will not see another soul until April.

She is an omega who has not smelled like herself since she was nineteen. Eleven years of suppressants. Eleven years of being nobody's business. Five months alone with a boiler and a book sounds like heaven.

Then the pass closes four days early. Her suppressants are on the wrong side of a padlocked gate. And the house that looked so beautifully empty in the photographs turns out to have four men in it - and a rope by the door with a knot in it for everybody staying the winter.

By the time she notices, somebody has tied a fifth. Nobody asked her name first.

Oz... The keeper of the house, who says everything in weather and has never once asked anyone to stay.

Teddy... The glasshouse, the goats and the whole valley's food - a heart that is terrified of being easy to leave.

Ilya... Sixty-two years of snowpack in one man's handwriting, who has not said a thing he could not prove in four years.

Kit... The plough, the machine, the road - the one who always comes back, and who has never once been sent.

By December she can smell her own wrists. By January she has a nest, a lamp of her own, and four men who would sooner cut off a hand than get it wrong.

And by March there is a company from outside that wants the road decommissioned, twenty-two people who will quietly be gone by September, and one woman who has spent her entire life leaving rooms in order to make them better.

The road does not open until April.

Neither, it turns out, does she.

***

Knot Until Spring is a cozy, MFMM, why-choose omegaverse romance: one heroine, four devoted alphas, no forced choice, and a guaranteed happily-ever-after. Low angst, high warmth, and open-door heat that is negotiated out loud on the page. It contains scenting, nesting, heat, knotting and bonding bites - plus a snowed-in valley, an unreliable boiler, and one goat of extremely poor character. The alphas are packmates and found family to one another; there is no MM. Every character is an adult. Book One of Hearthfell