Off Shore Feel - Waves Edge Resort, #1

She poured his bourbon before she knew his name.

Three years behind the bar at Waves Edge, and Lori Deveraux has perfected the architecture of distance — the right pour, the right professional remove, the careful record that protects a future she's still too guarded to claim. She reads guests the way other people read weather: patterns, tells, the drink order that says more than the conversation does.

Then a man checks in under a borrowed name and takes the end stool every night with the kind of quiet, unhurried attention that makes distance feel like something she's been hiding behind, not building toward.

Wesley Calloway was born with one name and made famous under another. As Wes Cade — three albums, two Grammy nominations, forty million monthly listeners — he hasn't written an honest song in two years. He came to Waves Edge to disappear long enough to find the music again. He didn't plan on the bartender who watches the room the way he listens to a song: with the kind of precision that catches everything, including the things he's not saying.

What starts as bourbon and silence becomes something neither of them has a category for — six weeks of slow-building intimacy that exists in the gap between who they are at work and who they become after hours, in the annex room with the garden door and the narrow bed and the ocean underneath everything.

Then a returning guest's offhand comment connects Calloway, W. to album covers and forty million streams, and the careful thing they've been building cracks open.

Now Lori has to decide what's worse: the professional risk she can calculate, or the personal one she can't — loving a man who let her choose him without knowing the full cost of the choosing.

Off Shore Feel is a slow-burn contemporary romance with alternating dual POV, explicit heat, and an HEA. Book 1 of the Waves Edge Series.