Fever Called Your Name

Heat turns Mercy Harbor's ER into a pressure cooker-and Tessa Marlowe is the one holding it together. Until the disaster team arrives and one man says her name like a memory he never stopped touching.

Tessa is a nurse with a talent for triage and a gift for keeping her grief locked behind clean lines and steady hands. During a brutal heatwave and a citywide emergency drill, the hospital becomes a maze of bodies, sirens, and split-second choices. She knows how to save strangers. She's less sure she can save herself.

Then Rowan Cade walks into her corridor-part disaster response, part trouble, all heat. He's the kind of man who reads a room instantly and sees through her practiced calm. He's also the last person she should want: too close to the past she won't speak about, too skilled at getting under her skin, and too willing to risk everything for the people in his care.

As real emergencies replace rehearsed protocols, Tessa and Rowan are forced into the same tight spaces-supply closets, back stairwells, ambulance bays-where adrenaline blurs into hunger and restraint starts to fray. But the more she lets him in, the more dangerous the truth becomes: the night that broke her isn't finished collecting its debt, and someone inside Mercy Harbor is determined to keep it buried.

In a hospital where every heartbeat is counted, desire is the one thing neither of them can chart. And when the line between duty and devotion snaps, Tessa must decide what she's willing to lose-her career, her control, or the one man who makes her feel alive again.