The Enemy's Rival

Four forty-five in the morning at Harborside Pier, and the Mary Rose will not start. The engine gives back nothing but the hollow click of a starter motor spinning against an empty chamber. Finn Malloy traces the fuel line by hand in the dim light, and his thumb finds the cut before his eyes do. Clean. One straight slice through the rubber, six inches from the filter, no fraying, no tearing. Somebody took a knife to it, and somebody knew what they were doing. He splices in a new section with a brass coupler, wraps the joint in duct tape and a zip tie, and goes out anyway. His sister's kidney function is down to fifteen percent. The transplant costs eighty-five thousand dollars. Finn has three thousand in a coffee can under his bunk. In a restaurant kitchen across town at seven in the morning, Declan is halfway through a case of lemons when his sous-chef appears in the doorway holding her phone like a warning. Grady Quinn has bought every pound of lobster within forty miles. Every pound. Paid cash. Called every supplier between there and Rockland starting the night before. Declan needs forty pounds for a tasting menu that is supposed to convince investors he is something other than Silas Donovan's son. So he makes Finn an offer. Two hundred pounds a week, every week, through September, as his exclusive supplier, at premium price. Finn does not take it at face value. *You're a Donovan. I'm a Malloy. Your father's been trying to squeeze me out since mine died.* The angle, as it turns out, is that Silas threw Declan out at seventeen for telling him he was gay, standing on the porch in a bathrobe, and would not even let him pack. His mother found him at the bus station three hours later with a duffel bag and a hundred dollars she had lifted from her husband's wallet while he slept. *You want to save your sister. I want to beat my father at his own game.* After that come a fire, a licence problem, a spy, a fight on the pier that Finn loses in every way that matters, a hospital waiting room at three in the morning where Declan keeps feeding money into a vending machine because it is something to do with his hands, and a set of transfer forms signed at a notary's counter that hand over everything one man spent eight years building. *I'm not here for your family. I'm here for you.* This is a small-town MM romance on a working waterfront: a lobsterman with a sick sister and a sabotaged boat, a chef with a surname he refuses to spend, a developer buying the harbour lot by lot, and a proposal that somebody else thinks of first. The romance is closed-door.