KEPT BY THE TIDE

The tide decides who leaves the island. He decides who stays.

Jo Delacroix has seven days to audit a failing oyster cannery, and the tide has other plans. The causeway floods behind her, the only boat belongs to the man she's supposed to be investigating, and her signature is the last thing standing between Callum Ardern and foreclosure.

Cal is forty-six, a widower with salt in his beard, six years of silence, and no intention of ever wanting anything again. Then a curvy, sharp-tongued stranger corrects his math at his own kitchen table, and something in him goes quiet and certain. Mine. He knows how it sounds. He says it anyway.

Jo has spent her whole life making herself small and useful so people would keep her around. Cal looks at her like keeping her is the only thing that matters. It's too fast, and it's dangerous, because her report can ruin him and his bed is the only place she wants to be.

Then she finds the altered ledger, and the name behind it belongs to someone Cal would burn the island down to protect.

A lender who wants the land. A lie she can't take back. A choice between the rules she's built her worth on and the man who claimed her.

Two tides a day. One way off. Every promise on Corran Island gets kept or broken with the water.

Standalone. Guaranteed HEA. No cheating. No cliffhanger.

Tropes: Instalove · Age Gap (46M/26F) · Possessive Alpha · Curvy Heroine · Forced Proximity · Found Family · Dark Romance

Content note: 18+ only. This book contains explicit sexual content, possessive and obsessive dynamics, morally gray choices, financial crime, blackmail, and the grief of a spouse's death.