Wesley Doyle: Stories

A The Wanting Series Story
The scan arrives at 1200 dpi (sorry for the delay, cat was on the scanner), and under Ash's name Margot finds a second line the book called a smudge. He wants to see the stone. He can't fly, can't cross a border — a passport requires having been born. So Cora does the one thing she swore she never would: she lights the candle on purpose. Eleven seconds. Then a field in Northumberland, a ninety-year-old farmer, and four words that rewrite nine hundred years.

A The Wanting Series Story
He feeds on wanting. She takes him to Costco. Five weeks after Cora accidentally summoned a nine-hundred-year-old incubus with a candle, he wants one thing: a warehouse membership card with his name on it. What he doesn't expect is what a store full of people wanting things does to a creature who's spent nine centuries being wanted for darker reasons—or that a free sample from a woman named Deloris might undo him completely.

A The Wanting Series Story
Cora has three rules for surviving a bad breakup, and she's already broken two of them. The third involves the ridiculous candle her sister mailed her — the one that comes with a demon attached. He feeds on desire and has done it for centuries. What he's never once been is wanted back.

A The Wanting Series Story
A man in Hazel Dell buys twelve candles—and starts summoning Cora's incubus to do the one thing he refuses to do: reach into a woman's mind and make her want him. When the man won't stop, Cora's whole chaotic family goes to war, armed with a binder, a casserole, and an actuary. A steamy paranormal rom-com about consent, found family, and the difference between being wanted and being used. Book One of the Wanting Series.

Harlan hasn't done much since Ruth died but let the fire go out. Then her dog wanders onto the thawing lake, the ice opens under both of them, and the cold water asks him a question he's been dodging all winter: does he still want to climb out? A short, sharp story about grief, a dog, and the work of staying alive. (~1,000 words — one sitting.)

A widow keeps her husband on ice, and herself frozen too.

Lisbon, 1943. The last neutral capital in Europe, where tungsten buys both sides and every café hides a courier. Calvin Brennan files for the Chicago Tribune and quietly works for the OSS. Then he meets Vera at the Casino do Estoril—Polish, beautiful, and held on a leash he can't yet see. She says she's been sent to work him. He believes her. The only way out runs through a man Berlin wants kept breathing. A twelve-chapter serial: espionage, slow-burn romance, and gallows wit.