The Fiancé Protocol

About this book

Portland baker Wren Park films the wrong thing on a delivery livestream and becomes the only witness to a murder. The Marshals hide her in a tiny lake town as the fiancée of buttoned-down Deputy Marshal Cole Sterling. The engagement is pretend; the threat is real.

She filmed the wrong thing. He’s the worst possible person to hide her. The engagement is fake. The danger is not.

Portland baker Wren Park keeps her struggling shop alive on charm, sugar, and one iron rule: nobody stays long enough to see the mess underneath. Then a routine delivery livestream catches a state senator’s fixer rolling a body into the lake behind her — and by nightfall Wren is the only witness to a murder, with a very patient killer learning her name.

The U.S. Marshals’ solution is a cover story with a catch: she’ll vanish into a tiny lake town as the blushing fiancée of Deputy Marshal Cole Sterling. Cole is everything Wren is not — buttoned-down, precise, a man who color-codes his grief and hasn’t let anyone close since he buried his wife while guarding a stranger. He thinks love is just a list of people you failed to protect. She thinks love is a clock that runs out the moment someone really sees you. They couldn’t fake a romance to save their lives, which is exactly why the whole town believes it.

Between a matchmaking diner owner, a suspicious sheriff, a three-legged dog, and one cabin with thin walls, the lie starts telling the truth. But the fixer is closing in, someone inside is selling Wren’s secrets, and when the danger gets too close, Cole does the cruelest kind thing he knows — he shoulders his go-bag and calls it the job. Now Wren has to decide whether to disappear quietly one more time, or finally stop being the girl who lets people walk out the door.

The reckoning is coming at the summer bonfire. And this time, the baker isn’t running.

The Fiancé Protocol is a sweet (closed-door) small-town romantic suspense with a fake engagement, forced proximity, a grumpy-sunshine pairing, a found family worth fighting for, and a hard-won happily ever after. Standalone, no cliffhanger.