Keel And Conquest

"There are men who build cages and men who build boats. The dangerous ones do both."

Cassander Locke lost everything to a devastating betrayal by his business partner. Two years later, he finds the one person who can give him answers: his partner's wife, Freya. Driven by vengeance, Cass kidnaps her, dragging her to his isolated, dead-end boatyard in the sweltering Lower Florida Keys. He expects a complicit, spoiled wife. Instead, he gets a fiercely resilient woman who refuses to break, even as he forces her to endure grueling labor, helping him build a 32-foot wooden sailboat by hand.

Freya is hiding a dangerous secret—proof that her husband didn't just steal from Cass, but meticulously planned to frame him for a federal crime. She came to the Keys to warn him, only to be taken captive by the very man she was trying to save.

But before she can reveal the truth, a catastrophic Category 2 hurricane bears down on the island. Trapped together as the storm surge rises and the violent winds threaten to destroy the boatyard, the lines between captor and captive begin to blur. Forced to rely on each other to survive the deadly storm, the toxic tension between them ignites into a consuming, undeniable passion.