The explosive conclusion to the Whisper Cove series. Chloe's story ends here!
He left her a letter. She never read it. Five years later he's back, and the one thing she has never told anyone is sitting on her porch steps with his chin.
Chloe Kelly has built a life on Beach Rose Crossing on a vet-clinic paycheck, a sewing room and pure Downeast stubbornness. Two little boys. A ninety-pound dog who barks at everybody. A roof she tarped herself, alone, in the dark.
Then Gabe Patterson pulls into her dooryard, and the dog who doesn't know anybody runs to him like he never left.
Gabe spent five years tearing down his father's empire, exactly the way he promised in the letter he wedged in her storm door. He came back to explain. He didn't expect a dark-haired boy waiting on the steps. A boy turning five in October.
But Gabe isn't the only thing coming for her that week.
A letter from the county reopens Chloe's finalized adoption of her younger son, Elijah, the safe-haven baby she has raised since he was four days old. Someone has found a hole in a three-year-old file, and the law says the county has to consider blood kin.
The kin has a name. A nurse with forty years of references. The woman who signed Elijah into Chloe's arms. A Waterhouse.
Then Gabe lays a ledger on her kitchen table, bought with his father's money. It's page after page of struggling Maine families, listed by their debts and their children. Her own house is on page six. Beside it is one word: expecting.
Elijah's birth mother vanished years ago. The people who know where she's hiding are turning up dead. The hearing is days away, and the county has already packed her son's bag.
Chloe has never let anyone carry what matters most. To keep her boys, she'll have to trust the one man who already walked away.
DEFY is the seventh and final book in the Whisper Cove series of steamy small-town romantic suspense. It's a second-chance, secret-baby, found-family romance set on the rugged coast of Downeast Maine. It can be read as a standalone, but longtime readers will finally see the Waterhouses answer for what they've done. Chloe and Gabe's first summer together is in the prequel, STAY.
Genre: Romantic Suspense