She buried her old name at the bottom of a harbor three years ago. Now someone's dredging it back up.

Mara Voss restores wooden boats for a living and asks for nothing else — not friendship, not attention, and certainly not the sharp-eyed new police chief who keeps finding reasons to walk past her boathouse. In the small coastal town of Ansel Cove, that's more than enough life for a woman who used to be someone else. Someone who, four years ago, found the numbers that should have stayed hidden inside a shipping conglomerate's books — and watched two colleagues die for finding them too.

Chief Eli Whitlock doesn't believe in reclusive newcomers who flinch at unmarked vans and keep a go-bag by the door. He believes in instinct, and his says Mara Voss is hiding from something with teeth. When a stranger starts asking pointed questions around town — and then a body washes up near her dock — Eli's instinct becomes an active investigation, and Mara's careful new life starts coming apart at the seams.

She doesn't want a protector. She's spent three years learning to be her own. But the men hunting her don't care what she wants, and Eli isn't going anywhere — not out of duty, but because somewhere between the boathouse and the harbor road, this town's quietest resident became the only person he can't stop watching over.

To stay alive, Mara will have to trust the one thing she swore she'd never do again: let someone else in. To keep her safe, Eli will have to learn where protection ends and possession begins — and let her fight beside him instead of behind him.

The truth she buried is about to surface. So is everything she's spent three years refusing to feel.

Intensity note: High tension, moderate on-page violence (pursuit, threat, one significant action set-piece); romance is closed-door/fade-to-black throughout.

Tropes: Hidden Identity · Small-Town Romance · Protective Hero · Slow Burn · Heroine in Danger · Law-Enforcement Hero