August 03, 2026
My favorite thing about romance is not the kissing. (Close, though.)
It is the found family.
Give me the diner where the same six people sit in the same six seats every morning. Give me the nosy neighbor who means well and the gruff old-timer who would never say he cares but shows up with a casserole every single time someone is hurting. Give me the friend group that adopts the new girl in town before she has even unpacked, whether she asked for it or not.
That web of people is the real love story underneath the love story. The romance is what you came for, but the friendships are what make a small town feel like a place you would actually want to live. A hero can sweep a heroine off her feet, sure. But the town? The town catches her when she falls, brings soup when she is sick, and tells the hero exactly how badly he messed up. (Small towns are not subtle.)
I think that is why these books comfort people the way they do. We all want to belong somewhere. We all want a table where our seat is already saved. Romance gives us the door in.
Which brings me to Port Promise, because I built that town on this exact idea, and then I filled it with Hollisters to prove the point. Five brothers and a sister, scattered across one Alaskan island, each of them holding down a corner of it.
Kane is the oldest, a fisherman raising a daughter on his own and running the family since their father left. Rhys and Reid are twins who share a face and almost nothing else, one keeping the dock and the general store in perfect order, the other running charters and tall tales in roughly equal measure. Nash guides people across frozen backcountry and spent ten years living alone out at Misty Meadows. Finn built his lodge with his own hands and would sooner go under than ask anyone for help. And Eliza, the youngest and the only girl, teaches at the island school and is the one willing to tell all five of them when they are being ridiculous.
Every one of those brothers will tell you he prefers solitude. Not one of them gets to keep it, because Port Promise does not allow it. Gossip travels by marine radio up there. Scones travel by snowmobile. When something goes wrong for one Hollister, the rest turn up whether they were invited or not, which is the entire point of the family and most of the reason I love writing them.
Nash is the one I want to talk about this week, because Misty Meadows released June 30 and I am still not over him. He gets hired to haul a wildlife biologist across the Alaskan backcountry in winter. She is chasing a caribou wearing a failing tracking collar that holds a year of her dead mentor's research, and she has days to reach him before her funding disappears. Nash's rule is that he never crosses a line with a client. Her rule is that the work comes first. There is a two-person tent involved. You can see where this is headed, and then a wolf pack that has stopped being afraid of people turns up and it heads somewhere else entirely.
Here is the part where I make it easy to start.
Timber Ridge is Kane's book: a schoolteacher from Phoenix chasing a secret about her own past, and a single dad who would rather she went home. Crystal Creek is Finn's: a Hollywood actress, a mountain man who cannot stand her, and a fake survival show that turns into the real thing somewhere around the flash flood. Read those two first, then come find Nash.
So this week: text the friend. Save the seat. Bring the casserole. And if your real-life town is running short on charm, Port Promise has a chair open.