She makes everyone feel seen. No one has ever looked twice at her.
Willow has spent eleven months trying to bring a little color to The Colony — one petition, one café table, one stubborn act of kindness at a time. After a Novian saved her life in the war, she decided to become someone worth saving. She's been running on managed sunshine ever since. Tired underneath. Never letting anyone close enough to notice.
Reig doesn't do sunshine. The Formorian says exactly what he sees, exactly when he sees it — and what he sees is a woman fighting a year-long campaign for a rule that doesn't exist. So he does the blunt, impossible thing: he reads the bylaws no one bothered to read and discovers her crusade was never necessary at all.
He thought he'd correct an inefficiency and move on. Instead, he keeps turning up.
Willow has handed warmth to two thousand people who never turned it back around. She can't figure out why the enormous, tactless alien who dismantled her whole crusade is the first person to look straight past her smile and ask if she's actually okay.
Then the door she opened lets something ugly through. A conflict catches fire along the oldest fault line in The Colony — and someone is quietly making sure it burns. As an off-world enemy weaponizes her dream to argue the human-Novian peace was always doomed, Willow's careful sunshine finally cracks.
Reig has no soft words. No idea how to fix it. So he does the only thing a Formorian knows how to do when it matters most.
He stays.
A grumpy/sunshine sci-fi romance with a blunt alien hero who falls first, a heroine learning she's allowed to be taken care of, found family, forced proximity, and a slow burn that earns every spark. Steamy. Standalone in the Claimed in the Colony series — guaranteed HEA.
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