She said no to the arrangement. So did he. Then his hawk disagreed — in front of eleven witnesses.

Kira Holbrook has a PhD, a field deployment in six weeks, and a four-paragraph declination letter that says everything that needs saying. She's a marine biologist. Her work takes her away for months at a time. She's not interested in reshaping her life around a mate chosen by committee — and she's certainly not interested in Vexen Darnell, a structural engineer she's never met, whose family the elder council decided would be a perfect match.

Vex agrees with her, actually. He sent his own letter. He had his own reasons.

Neither of them had any say in the courtesy dinner.

Neither of them accounted for what happened at the soup course.

When Vex's rare hawk-form recognition fires across a family dinner table — visible, involuntary, witnessed by everyone — it doesn't change the law. It doesn't change their answers. What it changes is every morning after, when ignoring something that eleven people saw requires more effort than either of them expected. What it changes is the emails about bridge assessment methodology that start professionally and become something else entirely. What it changes is who she thinks about on a pre-dawn river swim, and why he contacted the Faroe Islands Civil Engineering Authority in August before he said a single word about it to her.

They both still have their reasons. The trouble is that the reasons were never really about each other.

An Inconvenient Instinct is a spicy contemporary shifter arranged marriage romance featuring:

A slow burn that earns every degree of heat

A rare hawk-shifter recognition witnessed at the worst possible moment

Dual POV — his restraint and her precision, both of them fully on the page

A heroine who is a working scientist and doesn't apologize for it

A hero whose silence is not absence and whose proposal is a ten-item list

Forced proximity done right, and a HEA that took three months and three days to arrive

Perfect for fans of Nalini Singh's Psy-Changeling series and Ilona Andrews — deeply built paranormal worlds, emotionally precise romance, and characters who earn the ending.

If you love slow-burn shifter romance where the tension lives in what isn't said and the payoff is completely worth the wait — this one is for you.