The Saltmarsh Series

THE SALTMARSH SERIES

Contemporary Small-Town Coastal Romance — Later in Life / Second Chance

3-Book Series • Saltmarsh, North Carolina • High Heat • HEA

“Three brothers. One harbor town. Every light comes on eventually.”

Welcome to Saltmarsh, North Carolina — a working harbor town on the Pamlico Sound where the tide sets the clock, the fleet reads the sky before breakfast, and the diner counter knows your business before you do.

The Saltmarsh series follows the Rooke family: three stubborn men who kept the town running while their own lives sat in dry dock, and the three women who haul them back into deep water. Later-in-life romance, high heat, salt air — and each book stands alone with its own couple and its own guaranteed happy-ever-after.

One family. One town. One long fight to keep Saltmarsh alive.

Book One — Slack Tide (Sullivan & Nora)

“He has kept his dead wife’s house exactly as she left it for three years. She is the only person in the county who will say that to his face.”

December comes in hard on the Pamlico Sound. Sullivan Rooke is fifty-six, a charter captain with a paid-off boat and no bookings until spring, living alone in a house so perfectly preserved it has stopped being a home. Her coat is still on the brass peg by the door. The whole harbor has agreed on his story — they bring casseroles and let him freeze.

Nora Thorne has been the harbor’s vet for twenty years and a widow for five, and she has no patience left for any of it. When Sullivan carries his failing old retriever into her exam room on a freezing morning, she tells him to his face that he has spent three years turning into salt. What starts as a straight trade — she will help him pack his wife’s house if he rebuilds her collapsing clinic dock — becomes something neither of them planned. And his daughter’s ferry is booked, on the promise that nothing of her mother’s has been moved.

Nora will not be a secret, and she will not be loved in the cold corners of a dead woman’s house. Sullivan has until the ferry lands to say one sentence out loud — and he has spent fifty-six years learning how not to.

Alternating First Person (Sullivan & Nora) • HEA

Book Two — The Dredge (Ford & Greta)

“He has six weeks to save the fish house his family has run for two generations — and the woman hired to save it has already worked out that the problem is him.”

Ford Rooke is fifty-one and he has been running The Dredge alone since his wife took the good couch and left. He is not losing money because he is careless. He is losing money because he cannot stop giving it away.

Greta Lindqvist walks in the back door in the middle of a nor’easter, in a blazer the colour of oyster shell, with a leather portfolio held against her chest like a breastplate. She prices his failure to the dollar in ninety seconds. She has saved ninety restaurants, she has a rule she has never once broken in twenty years, and she has six weeks in Saltmarsh — paid for, it turns out, with every cent of the inheritance Ford’s daughter should never have touched. And a development group out of Raleigh has named its terms: match the deposit by Christmas Eve, or they board up the windows themselves.

But Greta fixes places and leaves before she gets used to anyone. Ford has never believed he is worth anything he did not earn with his hands. And there is a name buried on page four of a document neither of them has opened yet.

Alternating First Person (Ford & Greta) • HEA

Book Three — Harbour Lights (Piers & Winnie)

“He keeps the harbor by the book. She has one month of winter water to drag a scuttled trawler out of his channel — and no intention of staying once it’s clear.”

For nineteen years, Piers Rooke has run the commercial harbor at Saltmarsh by the book. It is an orderly life, and it is not really a life at all — and it is about to be condemned out from under him by a developer who wants ninety dollars for a hat with the word harbor on it.

Winnie Archambault comes up his channel at eleven knots in a six-knot zone and takes a slab out of his main piling. She is forty-six, three times married, three times left, and everything she owns fits in two dry bags and a coffee tin. Then the county accelerates the deadline to midnight on December thirty-first — and forty feet down in the silt, Winnie finds a cable around the wreck’s rudder shaft, bright with fresh zinc, cut clean at both ends. The Sea Breeze did not sink. Somebody paid to put her there.

Piers has a rulebook and one promise: I’ll keep the channel open. Winnie has an engine and a lifetime of leaving first. One of them has to stop being the harbor everybody sails away from — and the other has to unpack.

Alternating First Person (Piers & Winnie) • HEA

Throughout All Three Books

Series Details

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What You Get

Come for the tide. Stay for the thaw. ♥