THE TRUTH BENEATH

Mara Kessler doesn't get spooked by paperwork. Ten years investigating maritime insurance fraud taught her that the truth is always hiding in a manifest, a timestamp, a number that doesn't add up. But the discrepancy she finds in a routine Callahan Maritime claim isn't a rounding error — it's a pattern. Someone at the largest shipping company on the Ashport waterfront is moving more than freight, and three nights after she flags the file, a car runs her off the coast road going sixty.

She survives. Her case doesn't disappear. And neither does the man the Callahan family sends to "keep an eye on her."

Rourke Callahan has spent eighteen months building a quiet, careful case against his own family — trying to prove his brother is running something dark through the company their father built, before the rot reaches everyone he loves. The last thing he needs is an outside investigator lighting a fuse he isn't ready for. The last thing he expects is to be assigned to protect her.

Moving into a safehouse she doesn't trust, guarded by a man she can't read, Mara has to decide how much of herself to hand over to someone whose name is on the same shipping manifests she's trying to unravel. Rourke has to decide whether protecting her means telling her everything — and burning down the only family he has left.

With a federal audit closing in, a boardroom vote that could bury the evidence for good, and someone willing to kill to keep the water quiet, they have one very small window to find the truth before it drowns them both. The danger is real. So is the ache neither of them can outrun.

Tropes: Forced Proximity • Enemies-to-Lovers • Bodyguard Romance • Secrets & Hidden Truth • Slow Burn to High Heat • Morally Gray Hero