Framed By the Mountain Man Firefighter (Copper Peak Sparks #5)

A steamy firefighter romance featuring the gentlest man on the crew, a gallery owner who sees beauty in everything except her own work, and a carved piece of wood in a shop window that changes both of them before they’re ready.

She framed his art. He reframed how she sees herself.

Someone left a carving in my gallery.

A relief panel in beetle-kill pine, the Trading Post courtyard carved from above, every cobblestone and timber beam rendered with a precision that stopped me cold.

The chisel marks were angled to catch morning light from the left. Whoever made this was awake at six a.m., alone, paying attention to shadows most people never notice.

I put it in the window because it was extraordinary. I didn’t ask permission. He came in that afternoon. Filled the entire doorframe.

Asked for the piece back in a voice so quiet it didn’t match a single thing about his body. I told him the work speaks for itself. He left without the carving.

He came back the next morning. Stood in front of a watercolor long enough that I knew he wasn’t looking at it. He was feeling it. I asked about other pieces.

He said they were at his house — thirty-seven carvings nobody has ever seen, made at his kitchen table with the door closed because the second someone sees a man his size doing something delicate, they turn it into a story he didn’t write.

Then he looked at my walls full of other people’s art and asked where mine was. I gave him the answer I give everyone. I’m a curator. I have an eye for other people’s vision.

He said, “Sounds like what I say about the carving.” He let me draw him. All of him. I drew him with hands that started steady and didn’t stay that way.

The next morning I unlocked the gallery and found his carvings on one wall, my charcoal portraits on the other, and the half-finished drawing of him framed in the center.

He was sitting on the bench by the window, waiting. He framed me without asking. The same thing I did to him.

Featuring these tropes:

Gentle giant firefighter who carves in secret Gallery owner who sees beauty in everything but her own work He’s been misread his whole life — she’s the first to see him right Virgin heroine, experienced hero