Jo Reeves quit her ER job mid-shift, flew to a remote Hawaiian island, and built a life small enough to never break her again.
Then a selkie with ninety years of damage and no interest in being saved walked into her clinic, and her careful, controlled, manageable life caught fire.
Kai's body is failing. His skin, the living tissue that lets him shift between human and seal, was shredded by a fishing net decades ago. Every transformation is a war he's losing. Jo's hands can feel the damage through his skin. She can map it. She can fix it.
He won't let her.
His body. His skin. His choice. And Jo, who has never met a problem she didn't try to solve with competence and force of will, has to learn the difference between healing someone and controlling them.
Meanwhile, his temperature runs at 101. Hers is climbing to match. The bond between them is rewriting her nervous system, and when his body shifts under her hands during sex, she doesn't flinch, and the not-flinching undoes him in ways neither of them expected.
When a viral video draws outsiders to the island, nine hundred people who've never been told the truth close ranks to protect a secret they don't fully understand. But the real threat isn't exposure. It's the skin that's failing faster, the man who'd rather disappear into the ocean alone than let someone cut him open, and the question of whether he'll come back before his body makes the choice for him.
Healing is something you do together.
