He clears deadfall. He reads ground. And when he finds something rooted and worth fighting for, he doesn't walk away.
Pine is the youngest patch in the Deadwood Hangmen MC — quiet, steady, still carrying the weight of something he saw too young. When Timberline sends him to clear storm-dropped timber off a hillside orchard, he expects a day's work and a drive home. He doesn't expect the woman on the ladder — stubborn, sun-weathered, and holding fifty years of her family's legacy in trees that can't be moved.
Wren Halvorsen doesn't need a biker. She's held her grandmother's orchard and cider operation alone for four years, and the heritage apple trees on her hillside are the only thing she answers to. But a crime family wants her valley, and when she won't sell the rooted ground she could never replant, they move from offers to poison and fire.
One woman alone on a remote hillside can't fight an organized family. And Pine isn't asking permission to protect what's on his ground.
She's not a package to be locked behind a door. She'll make damn sure he knows it.
But the closer the danger drives them — into his compound, into his war, into each other — the harder it gets to pretend the orchard keeper and the timber man aren't becoming something neither of them planned. Because Pine doesn't just want to save her trees.
He wants her. All of her. And he's done being patient.
PINE'S RAMPAGE is book 17 in the Deadwood Hangmen MC Series. No cliffhanger. HEA guaranteed.
