THE BROKEN ROAD
Book 1 of Water Runs Red
Everyone needs her. That’s what she’s afraid of.
In a broken world, a working pump can keep a town alive. Dina can fix one. She can rebuild a generator, coax another season out of worn machinery, and teach someone else to do the job when she’s gone. That last part matters. She knows how quickly people who need you start deciding they have the right to keep you.
She has already lived that life. She intends to keep moving.
But the water stations along the road are failing, and whole settlements depend on the repairs. Getting to them means crossing territory controlled by Wolf packs, where a stranger needs more than a useful pair of hands to pass safely. Dina needs an escort. She gets Luke.
A wolf-bonded road captain with an old Harley and very little patience for preventable danger, Luke knows which borders can be crossed, which silences are warnings, and when a crowd is about to turn. He also has a habit of deciding what should happen next before Dina has finished telling him what she wants.
She understands machines. He reads the smallest change in her breathing. Spending day after day within arm’s reach of him is going to be a problem.
At first, she has plenty to do besides notice him: failing valves, angry station keepers, repairs made with whatever can be found. Then there is the jacket he offers. The tool already waiting in his hand. The charged pauses when he could move closer and doesn’t. Somewhere between one stop and the next, she starts wanting the distance to close.
Meanwhile, the failures are beginning to look deliberate. Someone is pushing an already fragile water network toward collapse, and a wrong decision can leave people hurt before Dina knows she has made it. Her skill can keep the road alive. It can also put her directly in the way of whoever wants it broken.
Luke’s answer to danger is to get between it and her. As the stakes rise, Dina has to find out how far that protection reaches—and whether the man she wants beside her can bear to leave the decision in her hands.
She can trust him to stand between her and danger. Can she trust him to step aside when the choice is hers?
The Broken Road begins Water Runs Red, a slow-burn post-apocalyptic romance trilogy following one couple through a world of fractured loyalties, dangerous roads, and hard-won intimacy. Read the trilogy in order.