Cole Barrow is a man built on absolute certainty. He knows the tension of a guy line, the weight of a twelve-pound sledgehammer, and the uncomplicated geometry of his solitary, strictly heterosexual life.
For twelve years, he’s taken his wages, kept to his casual arrangements with women, and moved on. But when he takes a job as a rigger for the Gilded Menagerie—a traveling circus acting as a secret sanctuary for shifters—his carefully constructed world encounters a force it cannot measure.
Jasper is the circus’s star contortionist, an ocelot shifter who moves with a heavy, frictionless grace. He is quiet, unapologetically himself, and the most captivating person Cole has ever been near. Cole doesn’t stare at men, and he certainly doesn’t feel a profound, localized gravity whenever one enters the room. But as they share long, silent afternoons in the circus, Cole’s internal compass begins to violently spin off true north.
In this slow burn, opposites attract romance, Cole must navigate the terrifying collapse of his rigid boundaries.
He isn’t just discovering the impossible reality of magic—he is experiencing a profound straight-to-gay awakening. To step into the space Jasper so easily makes for him, Cole will have to stop running, lay down his heavy defenses, and realize that yielding to the ocelot might be the most anchoring choice he’s ever made.
