The Mending Season: A Second-Chance Small-Town Romance

She left without a word. He never asked why. The sea kept the receipt.Ten years ago, Addie Rourke ran three-quarters of a mile through freezing sleet to ask Rory Merrick to take his boat out after her father.Rory went. Rory didn't come back.Three weeks later Addie left Brindle Harbor, Maine, without telling Callum Merrick why she was going - and she has spent a decade becoming a woman who deals only in facts she can prove.Now she's the best marine claims investigator on the Eastern Seaboard, and a December gale has flattened the last wooden boatyard on the coast. An anonymous tip says the damage was deliberate. The sworn statement backing it carries her own father's signature. Her company is sending its finest investigator north.They're sending her.Thirty days. One bed in the sail loft directly above Cal Merrick's boat shop. A town that has not forgiven her, a man who greets her with coffee and a smile that doesn't reach his eyes, and one and a half million dollars riding on her signature.Because Cal is lying about the night of the storm.Addie can prove that much in three days. What takes her longer - what takes her through steam boxes and ice storms and a slow, aching winter of shared work and held breath - is understanding why. And when she finally does, the truth won't just cost him a boatyard and four people their jobs.It will cost her the one thing she has never been able to say out loud.The Mending Season is an emotional, slow-burn second-chance romance about grief, granite, and the season of the year when a working harbor stops fishing and starts repairing what it has - gear, hulls, and, if there's time, one another.Perfect for readers who love: Second-chance romance with ten years of history in the first sentence Forced proximity - she lives above his shop for a month A grumpy-sunshine flip: she's the guarded one, he's the warm one A hero who is genuinely kind, genuinely funny, and genuinely stubborn A heroine with a career, a spine, and the skills that solve the plot Found family, a whole town of them Small-town coastal Maine, wooden boats, and a bell buoy that rings you home A slow burn that earns every single inch of itStandalone. No cliff-hanger. Guaranteed happily ever after.Heat level: sensual and emotionally intense; the door closes at the threshold.