The Blackwood Thanksgiving Feast
By Silas Wrenwood
Some hungers cannot be satisfied with food alone—and in a house that feeds on despair, falling in love might be the most dangerous thing Julian Crane has ever done.
After losing his family, his career, and his dignity in a single devastating year, culinary historian Julian Crane accepts a bizarre commission: ten thousand dollars to prepare a historically accurate 1926 Thanksgiving feast on an isolated Maine island. Desperate and directionless, he doesn't ask enough questions. He should have asked more. By the time the ferry disappears into the fog, Julian is trapped on Crow's Wing Island with nowhere to run and no way back.
Blackwood Manor looms above the Atlantic like a Gothic wound, and its last inhabitant, the aristocratic, dying Alistair Blackwood, is nothing like Julian expected. Brilliant and lonely, wasting away from an illness no doctor can diagnose, Alistair hired Julian not merely for culinary skill but for something far more desperate: survival. The manor demands a perfect feast every Thanksgiving. Imperfection carries a price paid in blood.
As Julian uncovers the Blackwood family's two-century-old supernatural compact through shattered windows, Eleanor's ghost haunting his mirror, and shadow-figures that reach through darkness to squeeze his heart, he realizes the stakes extend far beyond his paycheck. The house is ancient, hungry, and actively hostile—and it has already marked Alistair for its next tithe. Every recipe must be flawless. Every historical detail exact. One wrong ingredient killed the last woman who tried.
But Julian cannot separate his obsessive kitchen precision from the devastating tenderness growing between him and the man he is racing to save. The house feeds on despair and isolation—and it has already noticed that two broken men are finding hope in each other. In a place that devours love to sustain itself, choosing Alistair may cost Julian everything.
A gothic supernatural MM romance featuring forced proximity, found family, and love as an act of defiance.
