Lingering Sea

Would you touch the one you loved, even if it might kill them? Antonio, a merchant sailor, has no idea how dangerous Fina Perona is when he rescues her from drowning in the middle of the Lingering Sea. His ship is headed to the home Fina just abandoned, carrying desperately needed payment for her father's prized wine stores. Pirates attack, and as Antonio and Fina escape the clutches of slavery, she steals back her family's small fortune from the pirate captain's quarters. Fina doesn't need Antonio's protection, she's more dangerous than he could ever be, but she needs his experience as a navigator and agrees to give him a cut of the payment in exchange for his help. Returning the money is the only way Fina knows how to atone for inadvertently killing her own brother, but what she doesn't realize is, before Antonio was a sailor, he was a thief. While threats of curses, witches, bandits, pirates, and traitors are all very real, Fina and Antonio are the most dangerous players in this story of true love and betrayal. Will they become each other's demise or salvation as they set out to find redemption and to kill a curse?

Natalia D'Angelo has spent the last seven years planning for the day she can free both herself and her parents from the brutal clutches of slavery and return back to Valencia to find her little brother, Antonio. To everyone around her, even her best friend, she appears to be just another half-starved young man in the slave camp. This is only one of her lies and the key to her survival. But, if someone was to see her chest binding or have other reasons to suspect her true nature, her mother's spell will break, along with the illusion that she isn't a young man at all. When a handsome quarry worker discovers Natalia's true identity, and learns her own father might be working to help the slave master, Natalia turns to a darkness within herself that she's willed away for years-a magic of blood and fire that might be her greatest resource and most powerful enemy.