The Lady Odile went down eleven miles off Grand Isle on a calm March night with her captain still aboard. The insurance company called it an accident. Salvage diver Sol Vane, who dives wrecks for a living and trusts nothing she can’t put her hands on, finds the deck log sealed in a freezer bag and one line in the dead captain’s hand: HM cleared.

By morning a man she has never met is standing on her boat.

Wade Callister lost his ship and his license to a finding that never added up, and he knows that entry. He navigates by compass and stopwatch, drinks one bourbon a night and never finishes it, and he is the last partner Sol wants. But a charter boss named Russ Lusk wants the Odile to stay on the bottom, Leon’s daughter is about to lose the family house to the man who held his note, and somebody keeps telling Lusk exactly where Sol is going to dive.

To prove the trawler was sunk on purpose, Sol has to go back down alone, sixty-four feet into the dark, with Wade holding the other end of her line. Neither of them planned on the storm, or what happens between them while it blows. Neither of them planned on staying.

A slow-burning romantic suspense set on the Gulf Coast, full of salvage, shrimpers, bad weather and a dock bar with a neon sign missing its last letter. Contains open-door love scenes between two consenting adults.

Five weeks ago a millionaire’s yacht ran up onto a shoal in the Marquesas Keys in the middle of the night, and his wife drowned below. That is the story. Her husband’s lawyers like it, the captain swears to it, and the insurer would very much like it to be true.

Salvage diver Sol Vane is hired to prove it, with Wade Callister, the master mariner who lost his ship and his license, on her boat and on her side of every argument about the weather. The water off Key West is clear as glass, which is the problem: everyone can see what you find, including a charming man from Grand Isle who ought to be dead.

Then there is Teague Albury, who taught Sol to dive clear water and once asked her to sell her father’s boat. And there is a small gray dive computer lying in the sand that remembers exactly when the dead woman stopped breathing.

With a tropical squall line walking in from the east and a hose running from Gray Lady’s deck down into the wreck, Sol has one morning to bring the truth up, and Wade has to hold the boat on the worst anchorage a captain can choose: a lee shore.

A slow-burning romantic suspense set in the Florida Keys, full of salvage, insurance men, hard weather and two stubborn people learning to hold the same line. Contains open-door love scenes between two consenting adults.