Salt in the Wound: An Enemies to Lovers Dark Romance
V. A. Ster
She built the case that would destroy her father.
He came back to finish the job.
Neither of them planned to need the other.
Merrick Voss left Harwick, Maine at twenty-two with nothing. No career. No sponsors. No future in the sport he'd spent his entire life mastering. Just the cold, settled certainty that Garrett Mercer had taken everything from him — a fabricated doping allegation, a rigged Maritime Athletics Board hearing, and one very specific, very false letter that ended a career the sailing world was calling generational.
Five years later, he's back.
He has money now. He has a plan. He has the leverage and the patience and the specific, cold fury of someone who has been building toward a single moment for half a decade. All he needs is access to the man who destroyed him.
Access like a daughter.
Cassidy Mercer is exactly what everyone assumes she is: loyal, composed, perfectly positioned, the quiet ally in her father's empire. She smiles at the right people. She says the right things. She has never, in anyone's memory, done a single thing that didn't serve the Mercer name.
What she's actually been doing, for five years, alone, in the margins of the life she was supposed to be living, is building a case.
The same case.
From the inside.
When Merrick walks back into Harwick with his jaw set and his cold eyes and his obvious, beautiful, transparent plan to use her against her father, Cassidy recognizes it immediately. Because she built it first. When he looks at her and sees a lever, she lets him. When he thinks he's hunting, she doesn't correct him.
She was never prey.
But here's the thing about running a long game against the same man at the same time from opposite sides of the same wall: eventually, you run out of distance to keep between you.
Merrick Voss is twenty-seven feet of cold Maine water away, every morning at five-fifteen. He fixes the cleat on her dock without being asked. He drives her to Portland and holds her hand for twenty-two miles. He says her name like it stopped being a weapon the moment it left his mouth.
And Cassidy Addison Mercer — who has been precise and patient and armored since she was nineteen years old — cannot make herself file that away.
This is a book about two people who came back for the same thing and found something they didn't have a category for. It is about old money and the rot underneath it. About institutions that fail the people they're supposed to protect, and the ones who refuse to let that stand.
It is slow. It is deliberate. It will make you turn pages at two in the morning and resent every alarm you've ever set.
It is not a safe book.
It was never meant to be.
Merrick Voss came to Harwick to ruin her father.
He got considerably more than he planned for.
So did she.
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING:
"I stayed up until 4am finishing this and I regret nothing. Cassidy Mercer is the heroine I didn't know I needed — not a damsel, not a villain, just a woman with a plan who is absolutely terrifying in the best possible way." — ARC Reader
"The slow burn nearly killed me. Twenty chapters of 'just KISS already' and when it finally happened I actually put the book down and stared at the ceiling for five minutes. 6 stars." — Kindle Reviewer
"Finally. FINALLY a dark romance where the heroine is three steps ahead the entire time and the hero spends most of the book trying to catch up. This is what I've been waiting for." — ARC Reader
"Salt in the Wound is what would happen if a legal thriller and a dark romance had a baby and raised it on the Maine coast. I've recommended it to everyone I know." — Goodreads ARC
"Enemies to lovers where both of them are running the same con. I've never read anything like it. The reveal that she knew all along is one of the best moments in romance fiction I've read this year." — ARC Reader
