Book 709: Arctic Heat (Frozen Hearts #3) – Annabeth Albert

In the final book of Annabeth Albert’s Frozen Hearts series, she takes the heat and turns it up in a winter setting! I felt this was one of the only things missing from the previous two entries in the series (Arctic Sun and Arctic Wild), especially because the protagonists living in Alaska put so much effort and emphasis on whether the mainlanders would survive an Alaskan winter.

Arctic Heat introduces us to Quill, the stoic ranger who was part of the team who rescued Toby and Reuben in Arctic Wild, and Owen, a cancer survivor checking things off his bucket list which included volunteering for a winter in Alaska. And if there’s one thing about this series that Owen nails in one line, it’s the opening line of this novel: “Come for the snow. Stay for the ranger porn.” So maybe it doesn’t fit the entire series, but I guess if you put “rugged outdoors man” instead of ranger you’d get it in one.

I feel like Albert is the queen of the slow simmer romance (with Two for Trust by Elle Brownlee being the obvious exception, I’m still debating another re-read.) Owen and Quill meet at orientation and they’re not supposed to spend the winter together, but queue rom-com central and Quill’s original volunteer can’t make it and Quill’s boss “inadvertently” moves Owen to the remote location. As the weeks get longer and the days shorter, Owen gets Quill to out of his shell and things start to heat up.

The highlights for me in this book were Albert’s inclusion of an Asian American character. The story doesn’t turn on Owen’s race, but you can definitely see decisions Albert made (mostly around food over the winter) that were clear nods to this. It added more diversity than many of the other MM romance books, AND you can tell it’s an Asian male model on the cover. She also wrote Owen having beaten testicular cancer and that did play a role in a few scenes that I felt were well written and respectful.

I continued to enjoy Albert’s humor and how she teased the gruff Alaskan out of his shell with the spicy exhibitionist West Coaster in a series of wonderfully intimate moments. She never rushes the sex and always throws a curve ball in at least once. I’m betting it’s to make sure the reader is paying attention.

The crises of the novel was a double hitter in that Owen and Quill finally had to have the future conversation, but that was put off by an avalanche call and subsequent scenes (take a wild guess, you’re probably right) in which Quill had to come to terms with whether he wanted Owen in his life for good or if he truly was ready to say goodbye at the end of winter.

Because this is a HEA romance, obviously Quill chose the first and there were enough squee moments to tide me over the grand total of 2ish hours before I jumped into the next MM romance on my list. If I was proud of anything, it’s that I didn’t immediately hunt down Waiting for Clark which Albert mentioned in the author’s notes afterward.

“Finally, eagle-eyed readers will spot the brief cameos from Griffin and River from Arctic Sun and Bryce and Clark from Waiting for Clark.” (Loc. 3,993; Authors Notes)

My Recommendation: This was a wonderful installment in Albert’s Frozen Hearts series set in Alaska. I really liked the change to a winter setting and felt that Quill and Owen had enough heat between them to warm up any size cabin, even if it was just with agitated glares and innuendos! Albert’s humor continues to shine, and the sex scenes leave you wanting more. So definitely a read from me.

Opening Line: “Come for the snow. Stay for the ranger porn.”

Closing Line: “They had each other and they had love and because of that, they had a future worth having, whatever it brought.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from Arctic Heat
“He’d never figured out why some people enjoyed filling a perfectly good silence with inane questions.” (Loc. 125)

“It wasn’t simply that he’d been the social one able to mitigate group politics and infighting, but he’d always been the one who cared the most, the one who ended up in charge because he couldn’t stand the idea of mediocrity. But this wasn’t a classroom, and he needed to remind his inner nineteen-year-old that he wasn’t going to impress anyone by being a model student.” (Loc. 245)

“They were apparently part of a photography-centered expedition, and Griffin, their guide, had fascinating tips for trying to capture the night sky.” (Loc. 2,338)

“He had some sort of reverse flashback thing going, a vision of future Quill playing music and eating salmon pot pie for the tenth year in a row simply because they’d done it the once and he ‘didn’t hate it.’ Owen had to blink hard, keep himself centered in the present, in what was actually possible.” (Loc. 2,534)

“He was going down with the you’re-better-off-without-me ship, and there wasn’t a fucking thing Owen could do about it.” (Loc. 3,123)