Spark And Spite - Undertow Sins, #22

"We called it war. We called it hate. We called it everything but the thing it was, because naming it would have meant admitting we were already ruined."

For two years, Neve Gallagher has lived with a burning hatred for Priest Deveraux. He is the brilliant, icy freelance electrician who testified against her brother, tearing her family apart and leaving her alone to run The Blackthorn, a rugged bar on the isolated shores of Meridian Island. She's promised herself she will never forgive him, never look at him, and never let him past her defenses.

But when a catastrophic tropical storm decimates the island's power grid, plunging the community into total darkness during a suffocating coastal heatwave, everything changes. The mainland is entirely cut off. The grid is shattered. And Priest is the only man on the island with the power to fix it.

To save her business and her community, Neve is forced into a dangerous bargain: letting Priest into her bar's back room to rebuild the destroyed transformer. Trapped together in suffocating proximity, the fragile walls of animosity they built begin to crack. Every glance is a spark, every touch is a current, and the pitch-black shadows only serve to amplify the intoxicating, dangerous tension that has simmered between them for years.

But as the lights stay off, secrets come to light. Neve discovers a hidden surveillance logbook detailing a ruthless criminal network operating right under their noses. While she suspects Priest might be tangled up in the illegal operations, the truth is far more shattering: Priest never betrayed her brother. He absorbed her hatred and accepted a prison sentence to protect Callum from the real monsters closing in.

Now, with a criminal threat narrowing its sights on the island, their personal war must end. To survive, Neve and Priest will have to lower their defensive perimeters, splice their lives together, and realize that the line between absolute hatred and consuming passion has already been burned away.