Homecoming

A road trip. A family. A baby who changes everything.

Rio Blackwater left New Mexico five months ago for a bartending gig on Block Island. He's coming back pregnant, bonded to a snow leopard who's never met his family, and driving thirty-two hours in a truck with a cassette player and a spreadsheet for optimal traffic patterns. Tenzin made the spreadsheet. Rio found it on the counter and loved him so much his chest nearly cracked.

A mother who already knows.

Shimá smelled it from the driveway. She waited three days to say anything, because that's what cougars do - they gather information until the picture is complete. By then Tenzin had already rebuilt her garden wall, fixed her roof, and earned the nod from Rio's father that took thirty years of silence to build up to.

A house with room.

Back in Rhode Island, the nesting hits hard. The loft is wrong. The cabin is too small. And Tenzin - the man who spent six years alone on a hundred acres - starts building a house. Not for solitude. For what comes next.

Homecoming follows Rio and Tenzin from the desert to the delivery room, through family reunions, nesting crises, midnight ultrasounds at an aquarium, twenty-five parenting books, and a species reveal that will make you cry.

Omega pregnancy. Fated mates. A snow leopard who reads parenting books with a sniper's precision and a cougar who fills every silence with love.

Safe Harbor, Book One. Set in the Common Ground universe. Complete story. No cliffhanger. HEA with a cub.