Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Mountain Man: A BWWM, Grumpy Sunshine, Small Town Romance

I texted the wrong number trying to save my best friend's golden retriever, and a stranger in the Kootenay Rockies told me to stop panicking and breathe.

That's how it started.

His name is Holden. He's a wildlife vet who lives twenty minutes outside a town called Crimson Hollow, which I've never heard of and now can't stop looking up. His texts are short. Surly. Occasionally so blunt I have to read them twice to make sure I didn't imagine the rudeness. And somehow, six weeks in, he's the first person I tell when my mother calls me a disappointment for the fourth time this month.

He's also the only person who texts me back without trying to fix me.

I'm Mara. I make candles for a living, I broke off an engagement two years ago that everyone in my family is still mourning on my behalf, and I have spent my entire adult life being the daughter, the friend, the partner, the version of myself that everyone else wanted. I haven't been just me in so long I'm not sure what me even looks like anymore.

But this stranger? This grumpy, beautiful, brutally honest man on the other end of my phone? He doesn't know any of those versions. He just knows whatever I type at midnight when I can't sleep. And what I type at midnight is the truest thing about me.

He hasn't asked for a photo. He hasn't asked me to come visit. He's never once said anything that crossed a line.

I'm the one who gets in the car.

I'm the one who drives nine hundred kilometers because I've spent two months falling for a man I've never seen, and the second I pull into Crimson Hollow, he's standing on his porch like he heard my tires from the highway.

He has. He's been listening for me for weeks.

Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Mountain Man is a fast-burn, slow-burn-in-text wrong number bwwm romance featuring a grieving mountain veterinarian who forgot how to let anyone in, a Nigerian-Canadian artisan candle maker rebuilding herself from scratch, six weeks of late-night confessions through a screen, a heroine who drives across two provinces because some things you can't say in text, and the kind of in-person chemistry that detonates the second they make eye contact. Sweet meets steamy. Vanilla heat with emotional teeth. Brief but devastating. Guaranteed HEA.