FORTY-FIVE DEGREES AT SEA (COMING WINTER 2026)

At forty-five, Regina Ashford isn’t having a midlife crisis. Her life just didn’t follow the damn itinerary.

She has a successful career, a beautiful home she worked her ass off to buy, a brilliant daughter building a life of her own, and girlfriends who know entirely too much about her business. Eight months after the end of an engagement she once thought would last forever, Regina is single again and figuring out what comes next in an era of Black don’t crack, when the pressure to age flawlessly is real and perimenopause seems to be discussed more often than the weather.

So when her younger sister and closest friends hijack her forty-fifth birthday with a seven-day Caribbean cruise, Regina agrees to trade Atlanta, work, and everybody else’s expectations for sunshine, strong drinks, beautiful islands, and a little room to breathe.

Then she meets Eban Anthony. Fifty-two, divorced, successful, and fine enough to make salt-and-pepper look like a deliberate act of seduction, Eban is aboard for his best friend’s bachelor trip and has no more interest in finding a relationship than Regina does. But somewhere between unexpected run-ins, smart-mouth flirting, tropical excursions, questionable decisions, and chemistry neither of them planned for, staying out of each other’s way becomes increasingly difficult.

And bad weather isn’t the only thing rocking the boat. As seven days at sea bring unexpected truths, hard conversations, sisterly tension, friendship, desire, and some overdue self-reflection to the surface, Regina begins looking at the people she loves, the woman she’s become, and what she wants from the years ahead a little differently.

Forty-Five Degrees at Sea is a funny, sexy, grown Black contemporary romance about love after forty, friendship, sisterhood, changing bodies, second chances, and discovering that life still has a few surprises waiting for you.