Salt & Storms / The Saltmere Chronicles 03

Some storms wash secrets ashore. Others wake the dead.

A cursed woman who saves everyone but herself.

A lifeboat captain who’s forgotten how to be saved.

And a century-old reckoning rising from the deep.

Welcome to Saltmere, where even the ghosts have unfinished business.

Salt & Storms is book 3 of The Saltmere Chronicles, a steamy British paranormal romance series rooted in Cornish folklore, coastal magic, and love stories shaped by storms, secrets, and the sea itself.

Contains mature content. Written in British English with authentic Cornish setting and dialect.

Read an excerpt …

The debris field told a story Jago had read too many times before—sudden catastrophic failure, no time for proper evacuation procedures, two lives lost to the Atlantic's indifferent hunger. Seat cushions bobbed amongst fragments of white fibreglass, an expensive-looking watch floating amongst the wreckage.

"Spread the search pattern," he ordered, forcing professionalism over the familiar weight of failure. "Anything that might indicate survivors."

His crew worked in grim silence, using boat hooks to retrieve larger pieces of wreckage whilst scanning the water for any sign of life. The radio crackled with updates from the coastguard—helicopter en route, additional vessels responding, but everyone knew the chances of survival in fourteen-degree water. Twenty minutes since the last transmission, thirty since the yacht had started taking on water. The window for finding anyone alive was closing fast.

"Jago." Tasha’s voice cut across the engine noise, sharp with something between hope and disbelief. "Two hundred metres northeast. There's someone in the water."

He grabbed the binoculars, following her pointing finger through the spray. At first he saw nothing but debris and whitecaps, then movement that was too deliberate, too purposeful to be wreckage. A dark shape in the water, arms moving with a steady rhythm that suggested consciousness rather than the random motion of a body surrendering to the current.

“Christ,” he breathed. "How is that possible?"

The survivor—if that's what they were looking at—had been in hypothermic water for at least half an hour. By all rights, they should be unconscious, coordination failing, minutes from cardiac arrest. Instead, they appeared to be treading water with an almost leisurely efficiency that defied everything Jago knew about cold-water survival.

"Take us in," he called to Tasha. "Careful approach—if they've been in that long, they'll be confused, possibly combative."

But as Saltmere's Pride closed the distance, Jago questioned everything he thought he understood about marine rescue. The figure in the water wasn't thrashing with hypothermic panic or showing signs of the disorientation that should have set in twenty minutes ago. Instead, she—definitely a woman, he could see now—turned toward their approach with movements that seemed almost ... graceful.

"That's not possible," Peterson muttered, echoing Jago's thoughts. "Water temperature, exposure time—she should be unconscious by now."

The woman in the water raised one arm in acknowledgment of their approach, the gesture steady and controlled. No chattering teeth, no obvious signs of the muscle tremors that marked advanced hypothermia. When she called out to them, her voice carried clearly across the water without the slurred speech that should have been inevitable.

"Help! Please, the yacht—there were two others!"

Jago felt the familiar tactical assessment kick in, the part of his mind that had kept him alive in Afghanistan when situations didn't match their expected parameters. Something was wrong here, but lives were at stake, and questions could wait until everyone was safe.

"Right, standard recovery," he called to his crew, his voice cutting through wind that definitely wasn't behaving like normal weather. “Peterson, get ready to help me lift her in. Davies, bring us in steady. And if anyone spots kelpies directing traffic, keep it to yourselves until after the paperwork."

As they manoeuvred closer, details became clearer and more confusing. The woman appeared to be in her early thirties, reddish-brown hair plastered to her skull, but her movements showed none of the deterioration that should have marked thirty minutes of cold-water immersion. When Peterson threw her the rescue line, she caught it with steady hands and allowed herself to be pulled toward the boat with an ease that suggested she was nowhere near the edge of hypothermic collapse.

"Can you tell us your name?" Jago called as they prepared to bring her aboard. Standard protocol—keep them talking, assess mental state, watch for signs of confusion or disorientation.

"Emma," her voice was stronger than it should have been. "Emma Sinclair. I was ... I was doing safety inspections on the yacht. Marine Safety Agency."

Jago filed that detail away for later verification while focusing on the immediate challenge of getting her out of the water. As Peterson grabbed one arm, Jago caught the other to help lift her into the boat—and felt his world shift slightly off its axis.

She was warm.

Not just warm for someone who'd been in hypothermic water for half an hour, but genuinely warm. Body temperature that spoke of efficient circulation, active metabolism, the sort of thermal regulation that should have been impossible under the circumstances.

"Christ," he muttered, instinctively checking his own hands to make sure he wasn't imagining things.

Emma seemed to notice his confusion. "Shock," she said quickly, settling into the boat with movements that belied her supposed ordeal. "Adrenaline. I've had hypothermia training—controlled breathing, muscle tension. Helps maintain core temperature."

It was a reasonable explanation, if you ignored the fact that she was chatting normally after half an hour in water cold enough to kill most people in fifteen minutes. "Right," Jago said drily. "And I suppose the training manual covers swimming like a dolphin while unconscious as well?"

He’d pulled enough people from cold water to recognise the signs of advanced hypothermia, and Emma Sinclair wasn't showing any of them. If anything, she seemed more alert and coordinated than half his crew after a rough training exercise.

"The others?" She looked back toward the debris field with an expression that conveyed exactly the right mixture of hope and growing despair. "The couple who owned the yacht—are they ...?"

"We're still searching," Jago assured her, wrapping a thermal blanket around her shoulders more from protocol than apparent necessity. "Can you tell us what happened?"

Emma's account came in broken fragments that painted a picture of sudden catastrophic failure—engine room flooding, electrical systems failing, the yacht going down faster than anyone could have anticipated. She'd been thrown clear when the deck tilted, managed to float even in the rough waters, watched the vessel disappear beneath the waves with two people still aboard.

It was a plausible story, delivered with the sort of traumatic inconsistency that marked genuine shock. But throughout the telling, Jago found himself cataloguing details that didn't quite fit: the steadiness of her voice, the clarity of her memory, the way she seemed more concerned about the other victims than her own miraculous survival.

"Right," he said as they completed another sweep of the debris field, finding nothing but wreckage and the growing certainty that two people had died while one had somehow survived against every law of physics and human biology. "Let's get you back to harbour. You'll need medical attention, and the police will need a full statement."

Emma nodded, settling back against the bench with the thermal blanket draped around her shoulders like costume rather than necessity. As Saltmere's Pride turned toward home, she gazed out at the water with an expression that Jago couldn't quite read—guilt, perhaps, or the particular weight that came with being the sole survivor of a tragedy.

But beneath that, something else. A familiarity with the sea that went deeper than professional training, as though she belonged to these waters in a way that had nothing to do with maritime qualifications or safety inspections.

The radio crackled with an update from the coastguard helicopter—no signs of additional survivors, search continuing, but hope fading with each passing minute. Two lives lost, one saved, and questions that Jago suspected would keep him awake long after the official reports were filed.

As they approached Saltmere's harbour, Emma stirred from her apparent contemplation, studying the village's stone cottages and narrow streets with an attention that suggested more than casual interest.

“Beautiful place.” Her gaze lingered on the weathered stone cottages.

"Been here before?" Jago asked, though something in her tone suggested the question was more complicated than it appeared.

"No," she replied after a pause that lasted just a moment too long. "But it's exactly how I imagined Cornwall would be. Wild. Unchanged. The kind of place where old stories still matter."

It was an odd thing to say for someone who'd just survived a maritime disaster, but trauma affected people differently. Jago filed it away with the other inconsistencies and focused on bringing his crew and their impossible survivor safely home.

FAQs

all books in the series …

The Saltmere Chronicles are six interconnected standalone romances. Each book features a different couple with their own complete love story, but returning characters and deepening mythology make them best read in order.