The Magnate's Obsession

The ferry terminal smells like diesel exhaust and salt and somebody's abandoned cigarette. Genna Langford stands at the rail with a duffel at her feet, watching the skyline come up out of a gray smudge into glass and steel. She frames a photograph and sends it to her sister with a caption. *Almost there. How's today?* Seattle has had fifteen years to change since she left it for Portland with a journalism degree. Margot's heart is failing. The insurance will not cover the full cost of a transplant, the waiting list runs eighteen months, and the most recent message from her doctor's office arrives with a red alert on the subject line and a number in it that Genna cannot negotiate with. So she takes a contract from a man her oldest friend begs her to refuse. Derek Whittaker sits in the back corner of a bar on the water with a highball glass and a pen he is not writing with, and he does not bother to introduce himself. He has spent thirty years dismantling competitors. He wants the truth about the night the Aurora went down off Marrowstone Point, and he wants it in a form that finishes Calder Industries. Two hundred thousand dollars. Half if she fails. A check for twenty-five thousand slides across the table before she has agreed to anything. What Genna knows going in is that three thousand people work for Calder. What she does not know is what Nathaniel Calder pulled out of the water at seven in the morning on the worst day of his life: a single sheet of paper, charred at the edges, wedged on a sheared bolt between two pilings, with one word on it in block marker. He has kept it in a desk drawer folded inside a book he never reads, and he has told nobody, and he has spent fifteen years and a great deal of money trying to clear his father's name. Thirty-two people were on that ship. One of them had a compass rose tattooed on his forearm and had been Nathaniel's best man at a wedding that never happened. A contemporary billionaire romance set on the Seattle waterfront: a sinking nobody investigated properly, a sister on a transplant list, a man paying for both sides, and a woman who has to decide which truth she can afford. The romance is closed-door.