Five years ago, Briar Ashford died so Vivian could live.
She rebuilt herself one careful choice at a time — a new name, a bookshop at the edge of a Maine fishing town, a life so quiet it barely makes a ripple. No one in Cove Haven knows that Briar testified against a man powerful enough to make witnesses disappear, or that the U.S. Marshals who relocated her warned this day might come. She's spent five years waiting to stop being afraid. She never quite managed it.
Then a stranger starts asking questions about the harbor, about a woman who "doesn't exist" — and Briar's careful life starts coming apart at the seams.
Cole Reyes isn't supposed to notice the quiet bookseller with the too-careful answers. He's in Cove Haven to run security for a marina client, nothing more — a job that lets him keep his hands busy and his head empty, five years after his sister's death taught him exactly how fast the people you love can be taken from you. But when he catches a man photographing Briar through her shop window, his instincts — the ones that kept him and his unit alive overseas — won't let it go. Someone is hunting her. He doesn't know why. He doesn't know her real name. He only knows he's not walking away.
As the threat closes in — a man from her old life who was never supposed to find her again — Briar has to decide whether surviving alone is safer than trusting Cole with the truth. And Cole has to face the one thing his training never prepared him for: falling for a woman who might vanish the moment he learns who she really is.
With her past converging on the only home she's ever chosen and a man who protects her like it's already too late to lose her, Briar and Cole have one thing working in their favor — they're both done running.
Undertow is a fast-paced, twisty small-town romantic suspense with a slow-burn, high-heat romance, a ticking-clock threat, and a guaranteed HEA.
Tropes: Hidden Identity · Witness in Hiding · Small-Town Suspense · Protector Romance · Slow Burn · Past Comes Back to Haunt