Wreck And Rage

"Some people build walls to keep the world out. He built a yard full of wrecks and called it a life. I broke in anyway."

Calista Vane destroyed her elite Manhattan legal career chasing a ghost. Her only remaining mission is to reclaim the Compass Rose—a thirty-six-foot sailboat that represents the last physical evidence of her late father's love. Her search leads her directly into an isolated, twenty-acre boat graveyard on the South Carolina coast, controlled by a man as unyielding and weathered as the ruins surrounding him: Ronan Ashe.

Armed with probate documents, Calista claims the vessel was stolen. Ronan counterattacks with a flawless county auction bill of sale. Their bitter legal stalemate is structural, icy, and absolute.

Then, Hurricane Lenore hits.

As the brutal Category 3 storm decimates the coastline, the access road floods, obliterating any chance of escape. Forced into intense proximity to survive, Calista and Ronan retreat into the SS Marguerite—an old, sixty-foot steel ferry hull overturned onto concrete pilings. As the black storm surge water steadily crawls up the shelter's supports and the wind screams against the iron walls, the perimeters they built against each other begin to disintegrate. Every forced breath becomes intimate, and every dark hour in the shelter chips away at their carefully calibrated discipline.

But the rising tide forces the deepest wreckage to the surface. Hidden inside the flooded cabin, Calista discovers a cedar box filled with decades of unopened letters, exposing a truth far more devastating than a stolen boat. The Compass Rose was never a prize—it was a blood-debt penance. Her father and Ronan's father were bound by a dark, thirty-year-old secret that destroyed everyone they loved.

Stripped down to their raw frameworks by the passing eye of the storm, Calista and Ronan must face the terrifying realization that their animosity was just a mask for an inescapable, consuming attraction. Trapped between the inherited sins of their dead fathers and the raw electricity building between them, they must either let the dark family past drown them, or use the wreckage to build a new life together.