Love is Blind by J.F. Evans

David Reize doesn't need saving. Hunter Jeffries doesn't know any other way to love.

At nineteen, David lost his parents and his sight in a single catastrophic night. Eight years later he's rebuilt everything from the ground up — law school at UT, his own apartment, a fierce self-reliance he wears like armor. The last thing he wants is pity. The last thing he expects, on a blind date his well-meaning friend won't let him cancel, is to actually like the man across the table.

Hunter is compact, stubborn, and built to take care of people — a criminal justice grad and rugby player who learned how to love by raising the mother who should have raised him. Now he's chasing a badge with the Knoxville PD and twenty-two weeks of academy that will take everything he has. He isn't looking for anyone. Then David walks in, and for once, being needed isn't the point.

At first they fit perfectly. That's the problem.

As David trains for a place on the Paralympic climbing team and Hunter fights his way through the academy, the two keep colliding over the same impossible question: where's the line between helping someone and holding them back? By the time David understands what he's been giving away, he's failing classes he used to top, dodging the friends who kept him honest, and living a life that has quietly become someone else's.

Loving Hunter was never the mistake. Disappearing into it was.

Love is Blind is a dual-POV M/M contemporary romance set against Knoxville's revival and the rolling Smoky Mountains. Expect slow-burn hurt/comfort, opposites-attract, a tender dominance-and-surrender dynamic, grief and rebuilding, disability representation written with dignity, and a hard-won happily ever after. Book 1 of the Love is… series.