The Machias Seal Island Count
An M/M Romance

About this book:

Two rival ornithologists. One disputed island. Six weeks of forced proximity, thirty thousand seabirds, and a history neither man can escape.

Tristan Hayes arrives on Machias Seal Island armed with spreadsheets, a vintage transit, and a mandate for precision. Simon Dubois counters with intuition, a battered wool sweater, and a maddening grin that hasn't changed in two years—not since the night a gale trapped them in the lighthouse keeper's quarters and a single aborted touch drew a line neither has crossed since. Now, marooned on fifteen acres of guano-slicked granite in the contested waters between Maine and New Brunswick, they must produce a joint census that satisfies two governments. But the real count isn't puffins, razorbills, or murres—it's the days until the fog lifts, the stove fails, or the careful distance between them collapses entirely.

As storms batter the lighthouse and the colony's cacophony drowns out thought, professional rivalry ignites into something far more dangerous. With every shared blind, every pre-dawn banding run, every argument over methodology that masks a deeper conversation, the border between them erodes. *The Machias Seal Island Count* is a slow-burn M/M romance where science meets surrender, where accuracy battles desire, and where two men who measure their lives in data points discover the one variable no protocol can predict.