Off The Deep End

When Callie returns home for the summer, staying at her best friend Mia's house feels like slipping back into childhood, until she sees Grayson Carter again. Once her best friend's quiet, overworked dad, Grayson is now older, rougher, and dangerously irresistible. He remembers her as a girl with ink-stained fingers and a reckless laugh. Now, she is a woman who is confident, sharp-tongued, and completely off-limits. Neither of them meant to start crossing lines. But whispered glances turn into midnight encounters. Denial becomes an obsession. And one forbidden moment changes everything. As passion collides with guilt, Callie and Grayson are forced to choose between the love they shouldn't want and the consequences they can't escape. Off Limits is a slow-burn forbidden romance filled with raw chemistry, emotional damage, and a love story that is anything but clean.

In my past life, I was performing emergency pipeline repairs 300 meters beneath the ocean when my oxygen line ruptured. I swam back for help, only to have my wife, Summer Yates, and her first love, Zachary Gibson, lock me out of the diving bell. Not only did they ignore whether I lived or died, but they also started live-streaming an extreme no-oxygen endurance challenge to the entire internet. In the end, I suffocated and drowned. Even after my death, Summer and Zachary smeared my name, calling me a deranged saboteur, while they ran off together with my massive life insurance payout. When I opened my eyes again, I had been reborn to the exact moment I was banging on the hatch. Right on cue, Summer's sweet, teasing chuckle came through the comm. "All units, don't open the hatch. Carter wants to attempt an extreme challenge today. He's going to swim back to the surface without oxygen!" Immediately after, Zachary's voice followed, trembling with excitement. "Babe, the sponsors said if Carter succeeds this time, I'll be the lead director on next month's million-dollar documentary series!" In my past life, I had begged them through mouthfuls of blood, only to be met with Summer's impatient urging. "Stop wasting your energy. You should save your oxygen and start swimming up. You're such a strong swimmer. Just hold on for another half hour, and you'll make Zachary's dream come true!" Now, as I listened to this pair of scumbags plot against me, I sneered and cut the communication. I raised the highest-powered underwater cutting torch in my hand and aimed it directly at the main load-bearing cable connecting the diving bell to the surface vessel above. They wanted me dead, so none of them would be leaving alive either.

Crescent Cove: Where the Tide Brings Death Gabe Mitchell once wore a badge with pride—until the night everything was ripped from him: his career, his marriage, and nearly his sanity. Now working as a private investigator and nursing an old bottle of whiskey, Gabe finds himself dragged back into the shadows of law enforcement when a series of brutal murders rocks the quiet coastal town of Crescent Cove. The victims? Teenagers. The method? Slashed throats, hollow eyes. And the message? Always the same—“The Rip” scrawled in blood near the bodies. But when the latest victim turns out to be one of his son Nick’s closest friends, Gabe is forced to confront the nightmare head-on. Each death brings the killer closer to Nick—and the line between man and monster grows harder to see. The deeper Gabe digs, the stranger things get: whispered legends of an ancient sea demon, occult symbols etched into driftwood, and eyes watching from the waves. The truth may not just threaten his son’s life—but the soul of the town itself. Now Gabe must uncover the darkness hiding beneath Crescent Cove before the tide rolls in again… and takes Nick with it.

Not long after getting married to my husband, he says he wants to teach me how to scuba dive. My leg cramps when I'm practicing alone in the deep sea. However, my husband, a swimming instructor, chooses to save his unattainable love—she's jumped into the sea to commit suicide. I don't ask him for help. Instead, I allow myself to slowly sink. In my past life, I stopped my husband from leaving. He saved me with gnashed teeth and allowed his first love, Millie Quirke, to drown. By the time he went to save her, she'd already disappeared in the water. He comforted me and told me it was okay, that he was glad he'd saved me. However, one night, he brought me back to the seaside. Just as I let my guard down, he grabbed my neck and plunged my face into the water. Then, he dragged me out before I could suffocate. "You were just cramping—it would've passed! But Millie got dragged away by the current because of you! You can remain in the ocean with her!" When I open my eyes again, I'm back to the day I was scuba diving.

Clarissa's life has always been a little bit messed up. From her job as the county's assistant coroner to continuously trying to maintain balance - she's just about to wear out. Two dead bodies and a "gift" would be all she needs to completely lose control and break the balance she has struggled to maintain for the past right years. But when an obsessed serial killer threatens to send her six feet under - Clarissa needs to wear her scars like armors and fight back. She's not about to let some witty serial killer mess her up even more, or is she?

He straddled me, his hips swirling in slow, maddening circles. His body was right there, pressing into mine, and I couldn’t escape it; I didn’t want to. His hands found mine and guided them to his chest, and when my palms touched his warm skin, I was gone. My pulse was a blur of frantic beats pounding in my ears, drowning out the crowd's cheers and whistles. With his face inches from mine, Alec leaned in. His breath ghosted over my lips, his smile, cocky, knowing, playful, and somehow tender all at once. “You okay there?” he asked with an amused tone, and I opened my mouth, desperate to say something—anything—but nothing came out. My throat was dry, my skin was on fire and my mind was completely blank. All I could do was stare at him, completely mesmerized by how his body moved against mine and that wicked smirk on his lips. Before I knew it, heat pooled low in my belly, spreading downward, and I instinctively clenched my thighs together to stop the throbbing that ignited between my legs, but it was too late as I dampened the soft leather.