Cove And Crush - Undertow Sins, #17

There are people who draw maps and people who burn them.

Adair Sinclair is a state cartographer who measures the world to keep it from disappearing. Assigned to survey the remote tidal boundaries of the San Juan Islands, her meticulously planned life shatters when she crashes her kayak on a jagged basalt shelf during a blinding, dense marine fog.

She is pulled from the freezing water by Joss Vane, a disgraced structural engineer who has spent four years living entirely off-grid in a hand-built cedar cabin. He resides in a hidden, unmapped cove, running from a tragic past and a structural failure that left two men dead and his reputation ruined.

At first, Joss is a silent, reluctant savior. But as the relentless fog traps them together in a tiny fourteen-by-twenty-foot space, the tension between them boils over into a magnetic, dangerous attraction. Adair soon discovers a terrifying truth: Joss isn't just waiting out the weather. He has a working radio. And he is deliberately hiding it, controlling her access to the outside world to keep her trapped in the cove with him.

Stripped of her instruments and cut off from the mainland, Adair must navigate a man who uses silence as a weapon and infrastructure as control. As the boundary between captivity and surrender blurs, she realizes the most dangerous blank space on the map isn't the island—it's the man who claimed it.