The Swarm Season. The Honey & the Hollow, #2

Last summer I stole the taste. This time, he gave it to me - and the season came for us both. Wren Calloway learned restraint the hard way. So when Stellan Broud finally cracks his gate open again, she doesn't reach - she lets him come to her. And he does. He offers the nectar himself this time, mouth to skin, the binding made the right way at last: the hum at full body-resonance, the most explicit, most complete thing they've ever shared.
It's a fragile, golden high. Underneath it, swarm-season is already pulling. Because the man she bound herself to goes away in the season - language first, then everything human after - and Wren has to follow him into the meadow and learn to be his anchor without becoming his keeper. The feral hive-mind isn't a mask. It's who he actually is. Loving him means loving that too. And while the season takes him, the town's co-op moves against his hive - a relocation vote that could exile the swarm from the only land it's ever known, with Wren's own bakery caught in the fallout.
Cozy and filthy and aching, with bee-shifter anatomy named with wonder and the heat dialed past book one.