Safe Distance

Sera Maddox kept the books for the people who want her dead. She copied them, handed them to the FBI, and let the U.S. Marshals give her a new name. Eleven months later, two men came up the stairwell of a hotel the government had picked for her. She left the program, kept the ledgers, and spent two years finding out where the money went: to the man who now runs federal prosecutions in Western Washington.

Now a federal judge wants to hear it from her. In person. Under oath. In thirty-one days.

Kade Vasquez doesn’t do field work. He does three monitors, a server cage, and federal supervised release, with five weeks left until nobody gets to ask him where he sleeps. He has already read Sera’s file. She doesn’t know that. What she knows is that he’s a convicted felon the government can send back to prison with one phone call, and that is exactly why she asked for him.

One cabin on Lopez Island. One bedroom. One woodstove. One rule: nobody knows where she is. Then somebody does. Then somebody finds the next island too. Someone inside the justice system is feeding her location to the people paid to keep her out of that courtroom, and the woman who gives everyone exactly forty minutes has started doing the math on Kade.

Forced proximity. Protector. One bedroom. She suspects him. He’s hiding something real.

Safe Distance is Book 2 of The Greywater Files, a connected series of standalone romantic suspense novels set in the rain and grey water of the Pacific Northwest. Complete story, happy ending.