Under the Balsam Boughs

By Somchai Yun

He came home to save the farm. He didn't expect the man who stayed to be the one thing worth saving it for.

Caleb Whitman built his escape with purpose—clean lines, city skylines, a Seattle architecture career carefully constructed to keep the past at arm's length. Returning to his family's struggling Christmas tree farm feels like surrender. The property is hemorrhaging money, the equipment is failing, and the bank is already using words like foreclosure. But the hardest part of coming home isn't the debt. It's the man who never left.

Julian has managed the Whitman farm for years—not out of obligation, but love. For the land, for the family who chose him when no one else would, and for Caleb, though he's buried that particular truth under a decade of resentment and grinding work. When Caleb steps out of his car and into an argument before he's even inside the house, the friction is immediate, familiar, and devastating in ways neither man is prepared to examine.

Then the storm hits. A historic blizzard traps Caleb and Julian alone in a remote cabin, with dwindling firewood, brutal cold, and nowhere left to hide. Back at the farmhouse, the farm's financial crisis reaches a breaking point. If the family can't salvage the season, they lose everything—the land, the legacy, and the future. Survival demands cooperation. Cooperation demands honesty. And honesty is the one thing both men have spent years avoiding.

Walls built from years of jealousy, guilt, and unspoken longing don't fall easily—but close quarters and shared body heat have a way of stripping everything down to the truth. Caleb came home to save a farm. He's terrified he might lose his heart instead.

A forced-proximity, enemies-to-lovers contemporary MM romance set against a snow-swept family farm fighting for survival.