Hold Still For Me

Henry Bowen studies insects on dead bodies for a living. The last thing he needs is a gym membership, a fitness assessment, and a trainer whose monosyllables are unclassifiable.

A forensic entomologist with pinpoint precision below the wrist and zero spatial awareness above it, Henry has eleven weeks to pass a physical capability assessment or lose his Costa Rica fieldwork permit. His plan: hire a certified trainer, survive the program, get the paperwork signed. His plan does not include putting his hand up a stranger's shirt to rescue a mole cricket on a loading dock, or spending the next three months cataloguing that stranger's voice in a leather notebook with graph-paper pages.

Garrick Clark moves four-hundred-pound freezers for a living and trains clients who never look past his arms. He has a CSCS certification nobody reads, a dog-eared copy of East of Eden, and a habit of making himself smaller than he is. When the entomologist from the loading dock walks into his gym needing a program, Garrick builds one that accounts for the science tangents, the protein powder disasters, and the fact that this man's hands can pin a three-millimeter beetle without tremor but cannot locate a doorframe.

Henry classifies everything. Garrick holds still for things that scare him.

Neither of them has a category for what happens next.

Dual first-person POV. Standalone. HEA guaranteed.

Hold Still for Me is a contemporary MM romance featuring a forensic entomologist with a voice that calms scared things and a personal trainer whose body reads everyone except himself. It contains explicit sexual content, real science, real gym programming, a mole cricket named Florence, a cockroach named Garrick, a field guide that gets every conclusion wrong, and a found family that runs a surveillance operation out of a group chat.