COOL UNDER FIRE

Birdie Vance is, by unanimous agreement, the jumpiest woman in Halford, Ohio.

She apologizes to doors. She shrieks at wasps.

She works the register at Hollis Hardware and swears up and down she could never so much as rewire a lamp.

The whole town finds her nervous, sweet, and utterly harmless — which is exactly how she wants it, because Birdie used to be someone else entirely: a U.

S. Army EOD tech, the calmest human alive at the moment everyone else's body screams to run.

After one call went wrong and a young soldier in her care paid for it, she swore she'd never again be the steady hands a life depends on.

So she built a coward, brick by careful brick, and hid inside her.

Then the Flats start to burn.

The fires don't add up, and county fire marshal Wes Calder — dry, watchful, and the one man in town not buying Birdie's act — keeps catching her being impossibly calm at the exact moments a normal person falls apart: backing a crowd to a safe distance before the trucks arrive,

killing a propane hazard with unthinking expertise, then papering the whole thing over with a shaky joke and bolting.

When a developer's arson-for-profit scheme to empty the neighborhood spins out of control and the danger jumps from empty buildings to the people Birdie loves — her neighbor Ren, and Ren's twelve-year-old, Theo, the kid who made her his safe adult — she can't keep hiding.

Not when she's the only person in Halford who can read what's coming.

To save them, Birdie will have to become the calm one again — the thing she swore off, the thing that terrifies her far more than any fire — and let Wes see the steel under the flinch, and be loved for all of it: competent, scared, and here anyway.

Because brave, it turns out, was never the absence of fear.

It's the shaking hands going in on purpose.

A warm, funny, page-turning small-town romantic suspense about a woman who's spent years hiding how strong she is — perfect for readers who love a secretly-formidable heroine, a steady swoony hero who sees right through her, found-family, banter, real stakes, and a hard-won happily-ever-after.

All violence is off-page; consent-clean, low heat, one late fade-to-black.