The Lion’s Haven by Caitlin Ricci

Devin has sixty days, three shirts, and a plan.
Aging out of a youth shelter with nothing but a library card and a savings goal, Devin keeps his head down, makes perfect coffee at the café inside the town library, and reads like his life depends on it. He doesn’t need anyone. He definitely doesn’t need the quiet lion shifter who sits in the fiction section every morning and handles books like they’re sacred.

He just needs to stop leaving him notes in pastry boxes.
Silas has spent thirty-two years being the patient one. The reader. The watcher. He doesn’t do relationships, doesn’t do drama, and doesn’t do feelings — until a shy barista slips a book recommendation into his pastry box with a smiley face, and his lion says one word: this one.

What starts with shared silence and vending machine coffee becomes something neither of them planned for — mornings reading side by side, notes traded like secrets, and a connection that builds one book at a time. But Devin has spent a lifetime learning to hide, and Silas has spent a lifetime learning to wait, and the distance between those two instincts might be the hardest thing either of them has ever tried to cross.

The Lion’s Haven is a high-heat MM lion shifter romance featuring a protective bookworm alpha, a fiercely independent former foster kid, found family that shows up with pastries and opinions, and a reading nook built for two. This is the fifth and final book in the Golden Pride series. No cliffhanger. HEA guaranteed.