Saltwater in the Blood
A Coastal Romance

About this book:

Ten years ago, Nora Bailey fled Cape Perdido for sterile labs and academic prestige, leaving behind the salt-stung wind, her fisherman father's legacy, and Jesse Cole—the boy who knew every current of her heart. Now a marine ecologist armed with a grant and a desperate mission, she returns to a hometown fraying at the edges: the bull kelp forests have vanished, the urchin barrens spread like a sickness across the seafloor, and the fleet is dying one boat payment at a time. To save what's left, she needs a vessel and a captain who knows the hidden reefs. She needs Jesse. He needs the charter money to keep *The Albatross* afloat. Neither wants to need the other.

Jesse Cole has spent a decade hardening himself against a sea that takes and a woman who left. He hauls empty traps through warming water, tends his stroke-stricken father, and guards a grief he refuses to name. Nora arrives with her quadrats and protocols, convinced data can mend what the ocean has broken. But the water doesn't care about grant proposals, and the chemistry between them—sharp, saline, and impossible to ignore—refuses to stay submerged. As they navigate treacherous swells and the wreckage of their past, the line between scientific survey and something far more dangerous begins to dissolve.

*Saltwater in the Blood* is a tidal pull of a novel: a second-chance romance anchored in the raw beauty of the Northern California coast, where ecological collapse threatens a way of life and two stubborn hearts must decide whether to fight for a future together—or let the undertow drag them under. For readers who love atmospheric settings, high-stakes environmental realism, and love stories that feel as inevitable and dangerous as the turning tide.