Edition Specifications

Author:

Maren Cole

Series:

Timber & Salt (Book 1)

Print Length:

312 Pages · Cream Antique

Format:

Trade Paperback (5.5" × 8.5")

Tropes:

Competence as Chemistry, Safe Alpha

A slow-burn, atmospheric contemporary romance celebrating blue-collar competence, honest timber, and hard-earned safety.

The tension on the cable. The grain in the pine.

Maeve Sullivan doesn't need anyone to carry her lumber. As the master shipwright running her family’s struggling coastal Maine shipyard, she can swing a broadax with the best of them and cuts tenons true to the millimeter. But with a corrupt marina developer red-tagging her crane and forty tons of winter storm surf pounding her granite breakwater, her shipyard is one bad tide away from ruin.

Enter Calum Vance: a six-foot-four heavy rigging superintendent with grease-stained knuckles, platform experience from Houston to Rotterdam, and zero tolerance for corporate shortcuts. Calum doesn't offer unsolicited advice or patronizing compliments; he steps into the bite of the rigging, matches her rhythm timber for timber, and quietly stands between Maeve and the men trying to break her.

As freezing snow rolls across Penobscot Bay and the town cannery wharf restoration reaches its breaking point, Maeve discovers the hardest truth of all: sometimes the strongest thing an independent woman can do is let a competent man share the load.