Hard Weather

She keeps the boat floating. He keeps the record clean. Neither of them planned to need the other.When a critical tendership limps into a remote Southeast Alaska harbor with progressive damage and a shrinking weather window, local mechanic Mara Reyes expects to handle it the way she handles everything-alone, useful, gone before anyone can watch her wait.Then the mainland sends Eli Thorne: engineer of record, documentation first, leave-by date already counting down.Forced into the same crawl spaces, the same limited housing, and the same failing geometry, they argue process while the outer villages lose fuel and time. Respect shows up under the work. So does everything else they swore they didn't have room for.But the structure that needs them is the same one that knows how to pull them apart.Hard Weather is a steamy forced-proximity workplace romance about competence, dual clocks, and the difference between being needed and being chosen.Open-door heat. Adult characters. HEA.