Undertow - Salt Line, #1

She came for answers. She stayed for him. That might be the most dangerous thing she's ever done.

Wren Calloway is a salvage diver with a secret. Eleven years ago, her mother — a marine researcher — vanished off the Pacific Northwest coast. The police called it a drowning. The Coast Guard closed the case. Wren never believed a word of it.

Now she has a lead: a remote harbor town, a sunken boat, and a dead man named Harlan Morrow whose dock was the last place her mother was seen alive. She signs a six-month lease on a berth at Morrow's Wharf, arrives with her boat and her dive gear, and prepares to tear the town apart quietly, methodically, and alone.

There's just one problem. The dead man's son.

Cade Morrow owns the wharf, and he doesn't want her on it. He's tall, scarred, brutally quiet, and built from the same salt-worn wood as the dock he refuses to let go of. He locks her out of the fuel pump. Runs generators at dawn to drive her off. Watches her from the dock house window with the focused intensity of a man cataloguing a threat.

She doesn't flinch. She doesn't leave. She leaves him a thermos of coffee and a note that says: Coward.

He keeps the note.

As a nor'easter traps them together in the dock house with a bottle of whiskey and nowhere to hide, the walls between them begin to crack. Cade carries scars far deeper than the one through his eyebrow — scars left by a father whose violence was as precise as his silence. Wren carries a grief she's turned into a weapon. They recognize each other the way broken things recognize broken things: by the edges that don't fit anywhere else.

But Wren is hiding why she's really here. And Cade is hiding what he's found in his father's papers — a letter, a warning, and a name that connects Wren's missing mother to the most powerful man in Cairn Harbor.

Their investigations are circling the same buried truth. Their bodies are circling each other. And the undertow — the invisible current pulling them deeper into the dark — doesn't care whether they're ready to drown.

UNDERTOW is a dual-POV dark romance with a psychological thriller spine. It features a possessive, morally grey hero, a fierce and resourceful heroine, forced proximity on a fog-drenched dock, and a slow-burn tension that ignites into something neither of them can control. Book One in the Salt Line series. HEA.