About Long In The Tooth by Brian E. Niskala
Some things are supposed to be extinct.
Josephine “Joe” Calder has doctored every animal on the Staghorn range well enough to know a wolf’s work from a lion’s — and the wound she finds on a dead steer in the Texas Panhandle is neither. Neither is Julian Hartwell’s guess, though the second son of an English lord has hunted tigers and dressed men gored by rogue elephants, and thought he’d seen every wound a predator could leave.
What they eventually track into the canyon country beyond Staghorn’s range is a family of Smilodon fatalis — sabertooth cats, extinct everywhere else on earth for ten thousand years, surviving in the one fold of ground too hard and too dangerous for anyone to have ever fully looked. Joe and Julian are the first people in an age to know they’re real. They won’t be the last people who want them.
A Boston collector arrives first, offering scientific immortality in exchange for a body. Then a man who won’t give his employer’s name arrives with far less patience, and Joe and Julian understand they have exactly as long as it takes for word to spread before someone with a rifle and a reason decides the matter for them.
Protecting a family that was never any part of their own world becomes the thing that finally teaches Joe and Julian what they actually want from it — a home, each other, and a country that doesn’t care what a person believes about themselves, only what they’re willing to become to protect what matters.
LONG IN THE TOOTH is a frontier romance for readers who want their love stories with genuine stakes: a cattle-country courtship, a discovery worth the whole world’s attention, and the specific courage it takes to choose silence over glory when silence is the only thing standing between something ancient and its extinction.
Free on Amazon October 6–8, 2026.
