Set and Drift

Eight hundred miles of Baja coast. A hundred boats in company. One boat carrying more than her crew signed on for.

Windward captain Gabe Serrano has one job this season: deliver retiree Walt Aldridge's 47-foot sloop Second Act to Cabo with the fall cruisers' rally, bring her in clean and earn the partnership his boss has finally put on the table. Clean paperwork. No favors. No family.

Then Walt's daughter talks her way aboard.

Sloane Aldridge is a laid-off photojournalist with a camera, a magazine deadline and a lake sailor's instincts. She's here to be her father's eyes, and she watches everything: the man in the heavy jacket who keeps turning up in the background of her frames, the satellite texts from a number nobody recognizes and the captain who teaches her the night helm and keeps rechecking his log.

At Turtle Bay, the fuel panga that comes out to meet them is driven by the brother Gabe has spent twenty years outrunning. He plays a stranger, and he leaves Gabe a warning in Spanish meant for him alone. From that night on, every mile south raises the price of a clean delivery, and the people setting that price know exactly how to reach Gabe: through his brother.

Sloane's frames are starting to tell a story Gabe hasn't. Somewhere between a cracked forestay in twenty-five knots and an anchorage with no cell signal, the captain and the owner's daughter stop being strangers. Now he has to decide how much of the truth she can carry, before Cabo decides for him.

Set and Drift is a steamy nautical romantic suspense with real seamanship, real Baja anchorages, competent adults under pressure and open-door heat. It's Book 2 of the Windward series and reads as a standalone, with a new couple and a complete happily-ever-after.