A Lick Of Heat

She can plate a flawless service for eighty-five strangers. She can't fix the one woman she'd burn the whole restaurant down to save.

Rebecca "Becca" Butler-Rice has three weeks until Journeys opens its doors on Melrose - her name on the lease, half a million dollars of other people's faith on the line, and a food critic coming who can end a restaurant with a single sentence. She has built one room in her life that nothing can get into. One place that is only hers.

Then, at five in the morning, she hears her wife being sick in the restaurant bathroom. And behind the toilet, tucked where the tile meets the pipe: an empty airplane bottle. The kind that doesn't clink.

Lisa is the toughest woman Becca has ever loved - three combat tours, a friend she couldn't save, a war she carries home every night behind her teeth. And a thirst that has moved, quietly, from want to need while Becca was busy calling the evidence laundry, recycling, stress - anything but its name.

Now the two things Becca loves most - her marriage and her dream - are on a collision course. And she is going to have to decide which one she'll let burn.

A love story about coming home: to sobriety, to a marriage, to yourself. A Lick of Heat holds heavy things with tender hands - a relapse and the long road back, the ghosts a soldier can't outrun, a kitchen fire that changes everything, and the fierce chosen-family sisterhood that refuses to let either woman drown. For readers who want their Black love messy, grown, wide-awake, and worth the fight.

Perfect for readers of Kennedy Ryan, Alexandria House, and Christina C. Jones - sapphic romance with real heat, real recovery, and a happy-for-now you'll have to earn.

Book Eight of the Journeys of the Heart series. Contains depictions of addiction and combat trauma handled with care, on-page sapphic intimacy, and a hopeful ending that opens the door to Book Nine. Recommended for readers 18+.