Surviving Raine

"There’s a moment when it comes to amazing books... where you realize that the book you’re reading completely and irrevocably owns you... [Surviving Raine] has that moment."
- Ash the Book Snob

As the captain of a schooner catering to the elite on the Caribbean Seas, Sebastian Stark does his best to avoid any human encounters. Interacting with people isn’t his thing, and he prefers the company of a bottle of vodka, a shot glass, and maybe a whore. There’s no doubt he’s hiding from a checkered past, but he does well keeping everything to himself…

…until the night his schooner capsizes, and he’s stuck on a life raft with one of the passengers.

Raine’s young, she’s cute, and Bastian would probably be into her if he wasn’t suffering from alcohol withdrawal. As the days pass, DTs, starvation, and dehydration become the norm. Even the most closed person starts to open up when he thinks he’s going to die, but when she realizes their traumatic pasts are connected, it’s no longer the elements that have Bastian concerned.

He has no idea how he’s going to Survive Raine.
***
Bastian isn’t the most pleasant guy Raine could have ended up with in the middle of the ocean with no chance of rescue, but he has an uncanny knack for survival. As she digs through the walls surrounding the stubborn and challenging man, she finds something surprisingly different buried inside…
…and he can answer the question she’s asked for years.
As she learns more about what has brought him to this fate, Raine is determined to drag this self-destructive man back from the edge of the wave. Isolation is her only chance to tear the man out from inside of the animal, but this one has been abused for a long time.
She also has to live long enough to get through to him.

"I thought I preferred reading books from the heroine’s perspective so that I could pine with her, worry with her and wonder what he is really thinking and feeling. Fall for him… with her. But I connected to this one and fell hard for him anyway. This one dug it’s claws deep in my heart because I got to be in his head and in his heart (and coming from a guy like Bastian, this was sorely needed). Let me tell you… he tore my heart apart."
-Maryse's Book Blog