He Tore Off Her Heart Like a Patch

The Ridgeback club was the only family Nell Quinn ever had. They took her in when she was a rough, unwanted kid; they were her mother, her brothers, her whole belonging long before she was ever Eli “Rook” Dain’s old lady. So when the club turned on her — when a lie she couldn’t disprove made her the thing that had to be cut off — it wasn’t a stranger who did the tearing. It was Eli. At the table. In front of everyone. He stripped the leather off her back with his own hands, cast her out of the only home she’d ever known, and told himself the fast, clean, public butchery was a mercy. She lost the man and the family in a single afternoon, unmade in front of the people who were supposed to have her back. Two years later, Nell drives back into Coldwater for one reason: Roz, the old woman who half-raised her, is dying and asking for her. She did not come back for Eli. She did not come back for a family that watched her torn off and said nothing. And she is done, all the way done, being a thing that men decide the fate of. But Eli has a truth he never told her — the reason he cut her off, the thing that changes everything and excuses none of it — and a man who has spent his whole life making the clean, brutal, merciful call for the people he loves is about to learn there is no clean stroke that fixes this. If he wants her back, he’ll have to do the one thing his whole life was built to avoid: un-do her erasure in the open, slowly, in front of the same room — tear off his own standing to give her family back — and then hand her the choice, with no control over what she does with it. Because the leather he tore off her isn’t his to give back. It’s hers to reclaim. On her terms. Or not at all. An emotional, found-family motorcycle club second-chance romance about being unmade in public, the difference between being protected and being decided-for, and a woman taking back her belonging on her own terms. A non-affair betrayal, a slow burn back, and a hero who has to stop cutting and stand in the open. Full-length novel with a guaranteed happily-ever-after.