What the Cypress Keeps

Twelve years ago he dove that black water all winter for my body. Now he's guarding my stairs.

Noémie Bastien vanished from Bitterroot Bayou on the night of the salt moon, and the whole parish buried an empty box with her name on it. She's back for twenty-one days, to sit in a witness chair and tell a jury what her husband did to her the night she disappeared.

Her first safe house is found on her first night. The only place left is her grandmother's stilt house in a drowned cypress forest, a house nobody can reach in the dark without the one man who knows every channel in those dead trees.

Wes Doucet dove for her all one winter. He has gone down on every salt moon since. He hasn't forgiven her for letting him, and he isn't going to let anybody near her stairs.

The cypress house has a piano that hums one low note with no hands on the keys. The rail sweats on a dry night. And someone who knows where she sleeps wants her silent before she takes the stand.

She's still Laurent Ferrant's wife on paper. She has a bus ticket home in her coat pocket. Wes has never once asked her to stay.

Noémie is thirty-eight. Wes is forty-one. A dark Southern gothic romance with a mystery played fair.

Tropes:
Second chance
Back from the dead
A protector with a grudge
Witness in hiding
One safe house in a drowned forest
Still Laurent Ferrant's wife on paper
A haunted stilt house
He dove all winter for her
A bayou mystery with fair clues
Steamy, open door
Guaranteed happily ever after

Book Two of The Bitterroot Keepers. Every book follows a different couple and a different house. Steamy, open door, fully consensual between adults. Content notes are at the front of the book. 18+.