Cadence Keys, Featured Author

There is something exquisitely fitting about beginning our BOUND author reveals with Cadence Keys.

By day, she will tell you she looks like a perfectly average, slightly frazzled mother of two toddlers, hair twisted into a mom bun. But by night, she builds worlds of longing, tension, closeness, and heat...with the kind of closeness that only comes when two people are forced together and have no choice but to feel everything.

Cadence has been writing since 2012, but like so many creative journeys, her breakthrough came in 2020 when lockdown gave her the space to finally finish a manuscript. She has been publishing ever since. Next week marks her five-year publishing anniversary, a milestone that feels especially powerful as she prepares to join us at BOUND.

Her favorite tropes tell you everything you need to know about her stories: friends to lovers and forced proximity. She delights in putting her characters in situations where they cannot escape one another: locker rooms, shared spaces, stolen glances, simmering tension...and watching what unfolds.

Her football series holds her personal favorite, Closing the Distance, but right now she is deep in her Clark Fork Hockey era, and so are we. She will be joining us between the third and fourth books in the series, which means we will gather at BOUND right in the delicious middle of the momentum.

Being an author, she says, is both hard and deeply rewarding. It has allowed her to stay home with her babies, support her family, and build a community of readers and fellow writers she would not trade for anything. That gratitude, that humility, that heart... it lives inside her stories.

We have been lucky enough to host Cadence in the shop before. Watching readers light up when they meet her, seeing books clutched to chests for signatures, feeling that spark of connection- it is exactly why we build experiences like BOUND.

Cadence Keys writes stories about closeness. About tension. About the inevitability of falling.

We cannot imagine a better voice to help us open this dark, decadent weekend.

Please join us in welcoming Cadence to BOUND 2026.

And prepare yourselves.

Forced proximity is coming. 🕯️🏒