Coil And Cord - Whiteout Sins, #22

The safest lies are the ones built from truth. That's how they hold your weight long enough for you to fall.

Maive Halloway is a relentless insurance investigator who catches liars the way structural engineers read stress fractures. Her newest assignment sends her to the freezing, unforgiving peaks of the San Juan Mountains to investigate a high-voltage lineman's fatal 70-foot fall. Her firm wants a foul-play finding, and the only witness is the victim's partner: Bridger Vance. Massive, scarred, and dangerously quiet, Bridger is a mountain of a man who hides his secrets behind a wall of unreadable, chilling composure.

When a catastrophic whiteout blizzard strikes, Maive and her prime suspect are stranded together inside a tiny, freezing 12-by-14-foot relay station. Stripped of her professional armor and relying on his survival skills to keep from freezing to death, the blistering forced proximity between them ignites into something undeniable.

Determined to break him, Maive uncovers a terrifying moral abyss: Bridger saw the faulty safety clip that killed his partner, and he chose to stay silent for four seconds to protect a vulnerable, pregnant woman from a monster.

Now, Maive holds an unrecorded confession that could destroy the very man who kept her warm in the dark. She has spent her entire life hunting for the truth, but she must finally decide what to do when the truth is the exact thing that will shatter the man she is falling for.