Hard Alee

Thirteen hundred miles of Pacific coast. Thirteen days to the border. A boat out of Sheridan, Wyoming, and a crew that came with her.

Finn Ashby ran a fish tender in Alaska for eight summers before he ever skippered a yacht. Now June has walked a job down the dock to him: bring the 52-foot sloop Larkspur from Ensenada to British Columbia, offshore the whole way, no US ports, and clear Canadian customs at Bedwell Harbour before the dock closes for the season on September 30. The owner is a company in Wyoming. The deposit landed before Windward had even said yes.

The crew came with the boat. Daniel Ames, the boat manager, knows every hose and seacock aboard. Nora Vance, the owner's representative, logs everything and misses nothing.

Two hundred miles short of San Francisco, a hairline crack opens in the gooseneck casting. Off Point Reyes it lets go in thirty knots, and Finn has to weigh the owner's orders against his boat and his crew. Somewhere between a jury-rigged boom and the long night watches north, the captain who writes everything down and the woman who checks his work stop pretending it's about the weather. "Not on this boat," she tells him.

Ahead lie the fog of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the dark of the new moon and the water Finn grew up on. The letter said offshore and no US ports. It never said why. Finn means to know before he stands on the customs dock at Bedwell and reads out his crew list.

Hard Alee is a steamy nautical romantic suspense with real seamanship, real Pacific Northwest water, competent adults under pressure and open-door heat. It's the third and final Windward novel. It reads as a standalone, with a new couple and a complete happily-ever-after, and it closes the story that began in Lee Shore and ran south in Set and Drift. Readers of those books will find a few familiar faces along the way.