The Rival's Weakness

Hugh Strickland has wanted this logbook since he was twenty-three and first saw its photograph in a footnote. Eighteen years, three degrees and one pending divorce later, he is in a folding chair in a basement auction room in Portland, watching a man in a linen suit turn its pages like a priest handling a relic. Lot forty-seven. The personal logbook of Captain Elias Thorne, who wrote his last entry the day before the Mary Rose went down off Matinicus Island with all hands. The bidding opens at four thousand dollars. Hugh's museum has authorised him up to twelve. He argued for fifteen. Eliza said no. The man bidding against him looks like he wandered in off a fishing boat and decided to cause trouble. His boots are scuffed at the toes, there is engine grease on his cuff, and a scar cuts through his left eyebrow. *"You don't even know what you're bidding on."* *"Don't have to. I know what it's worth."* *"To whom?"* Liam Donnelly takes it at twelve thousand dollars and gives the room a theatrical bow. He was not bidding for himself. The buyer is Jasper Cole, who is already telling anybody who will listen that the logbook is a forgery and the museum nearly bought a fake. Hugh is the man who authenticated it for the catalogue. If it is a forgery, his career goes up in smoke. If it is genuine, he is the curator who let it walk out of the room in a canvas bag. So Hugh drives two hours up the coast to Port Haven to ask a rival antiques dealer for permission to examine the object he has spent his adult life chasing. What he finds there is a cluttered shop that smells of salt, a man who studies him the way people study tide charts, and a grandmother in a nursing home with Alzheimer's whose possessions are being sold off one at a time to pay for her care. An enemies-to-lovers MM romance between a maritime historian and a small-town antique dealer, over a single object that neither of them can afford to be wrong about. The romance is closed-door.