The form has forty-seven questions. But none of them ask what it feels like to lose a river.
Finn Calloway lives by a single rule: always go back in. A field biologist haunted by a past mistake, he's turned the Whitewater Fork into the most documented river in the West. He knows the sound it makes in its sleep and the exact temperature when the cutthroat trout begin to spawn. He doesn't need people, and he definitely doesn't need a federal reviewer from D.C. telling him what his river is worth.
Isa Moreno is an expert at identifying what's broken within the system. As an environmental compliance officer for FERC, she knows that the law cares about checkboxes, not convictions. She's seen too many "sustainable" projects destroy what they were meant to protect. When she's sent to the rugged Ironwood Basin, she expects a routine technical review. She doesn't expect a man who reads the riverbed through his boots—and she doesn't expect the valley to start reading her back.
When a multi-million dollar hydroelectric project threatens to diminish the Fork's delicate ecosystem, Finn and Isa find themselves on opposite sides of a federal process. As the pressure builds, the slow-burn attraction between them becomes as inevitable as the current. But to save the basin, they must choose between the security of the protocol and the risk of the truth.
Where the River Bends is the sixth standalone novel in the Ironwood Rescue series—a high-stakes contemporary romance for fans of competence-kink, environmental intelligence, and the fierce, wild heart of Wyoming.
