You’re supposed to shoot the story, not fall into it.
When TV cameraman Beau Bolton gets stuck overnight at an Indiana highway service plaza during a mysterious “hazmat lockdown,” it should be a throwaway human-interest piece. Instead, the sky glitches, the building hums, and his footage keeps corrupting whenever he points his lens at the wrong trucks, the wrong clerk…or the wrong city engineer.
On the other side of Beau’s camera is Nathan Hollopeter—Fort Wayne’s grumpy “infrastructure guy,” whose job is to keep pipes, levees, and secret gates from failing in public. Nate can handle node surges, political spin, and underfunded systems held together with duct tape and prayer. What he can’t handle is a roomful of scared people staring at him while a news camera rolls.
Selective mutism has wrecked Nate’s life once before. Beau already turned his silence into a viral villain edit. The last thing either man expects, trapped together while reality misbehaves, is sex on thin motel sheets and a fragile, impossible connection.
By morning, Beau has the bones of a career-making documentary and a he’s pretty sure the “unfeeling engineer” he’s been crucifying on air is having a full-blown panic attack, not stonewalling. And he can’t stop thinking about the way Nate’s shoulders shook in his arms when the node surged.
Months later, the city wants a “hero engineer” feature to calm everyone down.
They want Nate’s face.
They want Beau’s camera.
They want a simple story.
What they get is two stubborn men walking back into the floodplain of their worst fears—together. Off camera and on, they’ll have to renegotiate blame, rebuild trust, and figure out how to tell the truth about broken systems without breaking each other.
And this time, when Beau pushes the mic across the table, Nate has to decide if he can push his voice through the wall in his throat long enough to say the one thing he’s never managed on
I want you. Long term.
Gatecrash is a dual-POV, hard-R MM romance set in the Fort Wayne “Faerie Town” universe,
• grumpy/sun-damaged civil engineer × sharp-tongued cameraman
• forced proximity at a haunted service plaza
• selective mutism rep, flood trauma, and late-night news shenanigans
• found-family coworker chaos and one very opinionated node
• explicit on-page sex, big feelings, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA.
Can be read as a standalone in the Faerie Town Tales series, but shares characters and worldbuilding with the Feeding Desire and Veilward Black Ops books.