Reef of Hearts

About this book

Marine biologist Frankie Brennan tends a coral nursery on a sandbar in the Whitsundays. Hugo Ashford steps off the supply boat with a lease-termination letter and plans for beachfront villas, just before a cyclone strands them together. A warm, witty enemies-to-lovers romance.

She runs a dying coral reef on a forgotten island. He flew in to pave it.

Marine biologist Frankie Brennan has built her whole life on a sandbar in the Whitsundays, tending an eleven-year coral nursery and the memory of the woman who taught her everything. People leave. Reefs don’t. That’s the deal Frankie made with her heart a long time ago, and it has never once let her down.

Then Hugo Ashford steps off the supply boat, seasick and immaculate, with a lease-termination letter in his jacket and his father’s resort plans behind him. He’s the closer sent to turn Frankie’s reef into beachfront villas — and the most infuriating, unexpectedly decent man she’s ever been stranded with when the radio cuts the charter and a cyclone starts spinning up offshore.

Forced together by weather, work, and one very tangled sea turtle, Frankie and Hugo discover that the thing each of them is most afraid of is the one thing the other one needs. But Hugo is keeping a secret with a deadline on it, and Frankie has spent her whole life leaving before she can be left — and when the truth finally surfaces, it will cost them both far more than a reef.

A warm, witty, salt-and-sunburn romance about found family, grand gestures that cost something real, and the bravest thing of all: choosing to stay. Enemies-to-lovers, forced proximity, a grumpy heroine and a sunshine-under-the-pinstripes hero, and an ending that earns every wave of it.

For readers of Emily Henry, Beth O’Leary, and Tessa Bailey.

Reef of Hearts — dive in.