The Harbormaster

She told him his lines were wrong. In front of his crew. In the rain. She was right. Hallie Brandt was the best chief mate on the Puget Sound ferries until the morning a boat that wasn't her fault hit a dock on her watch, and she found she could no longer walk onto a car deck without counting. So she took the only job nobody else wanted: harbormaster of Linden Cove, Oregon, a town of two thousand people with a harbor that hasn't had one since 2019, a Port Commission chaired by a retired dentist, a fuel dock standing on hollow pilings, and a twelve-foot gap in the breakwater that everyone has known about for fifteen years and nobody has written down. Theo Dawes has tied up in that cove since he was nine years old and never once looked at it. Twelve years in the Coast Guard, home for a month while his cutter is in the yard, the Dawes who never says what he wants and always gets it. He takes the fast turn on the cleat because it has always held. Then the new harbormaster tells him it won't, and she is right, and he goes down to the harbor office with a pie. A breakwater walked at dawn. A Port Commission meeting that doesn't go the way it has gone since 1961. An old fisherman's boat hauled up a hill by a dentist's check. A storm, a skiff, eleven seconds, and a man who has never asked anyone for anything, asking. A warm, closed-door love story about saying the thing out loud, the slow turn on the cleat, a woman who counts, and a man worth counting on. Second in the Linden Cove Romances. Each book stands alone with a happy ending; the Dawes family carries on.