Stone Crab Season

She buried one man to the water and swore she'd never love another. Then stone crab season came - and so did he.

At sixty-six, Doty Boudreau feeds a whole Florida fishing town from the co-op galley at the end of the road. Nine years ago the water took her husband, and Doty made her peace with it the only way she knew how: she swore off the water for good, and off the men who work it. Her cooking is her love now. Her turn at romance is over. She is sure of it.

Then a developer buys the note on the co-op ice house - the one building that keeps the whole fleet running - and aims to shut it down before stone crab season opens. To save it, Doty has to work alongside the last man on earth she'd let past her counter: Sonny Boone, a warm, widowed, joke-cracking crabber who has quietly loved her for two years, and who is out on that same water every dawn. As a fifty-year-old secret surfaces from a dead man's ledger and the season bears down, Doty has to decide whether the safe thing is really the same as being alive - and whether a woman gets to be brave enough for love twice in one lifetime.

Stone Crab Season is a sweet, clean, slow-burn later-in-life romance: a warm Florida fishing village worth fighting for, a second chance in your sixties, found family, a widow and a widower who both thought their best years were behind them, and two stubborn hearts who learn it is never too late to be wanted out loud. No spice, and a guaranteed happily-ever-after.

A standalone in the Everglades City series - each book a brand-new couple, and every one stands on its own.