Ride or Ruin

Nora Hartley told a man in a diner booth that she would keep him safe. Michael Chen was a former accountant for Vane Development, a father of two, frightened enough that his hands shook when he lifted his coffee cup. His daughter was turning seven the following week and he had told her he would be home. They left the diner separately and met in the parking garage on 12th, exactly as planned. Nora had one hand on the door handle when the world went white. She woke up in a hospital. He did not. Now she is sitting in the Riverside Diner in Cedar River with a plan rattling around her skull like a loose bolt. She has to get Tessa out before Silas Vane's deal closes. Her sister has already signed a preliminary agreement. Vane has spent eighteen months buying riverfront property through shell companies, and everybody he bought from had something in common: financial trouble, a family emergency, a legal problem they could not afford to fight. So Nora does the thing she swore she would never do again. She starts asking questions, behind a cover story about writing up hidden river towns. That is how she ends up in a garage with a mechanic named Liam Ashford, who has a limp, a wrench, and a photograph lying face-down beside his keyboard. On the back, in careful block letters: *Ashford Family, Driftwood Bay, 2019.* Driftwood Bay is the coastal town where Vane put up his last resort. There were displaced residents, environmental damage, and a lawsuit settled quietly out of court. And one more thing. *"Because my sister lived in Driftwood Bay,"* Liam says, *"and she didn't make it out."* He is not a mechanic. Nora works that much out early. What takes longer is what he actually is, who he answers to, and why somebody in a field office three hours north pulled a seven-year-old case file two weeks ago. A small-town romantic suspense about a reporter who promised never to make another promise she could not keep, a man whose entire life in this town is a cover story, and a developer who does not leave loose ends. The romance is closed-door.