BURNING BOUNDARIES
Twenty-three-year-old Isla Monroe thought she'd hit rock bottom when her fiancé publicly dumped her at their engagement party—for her younger sister, no less. Humiliated in front of Manhattan's elite, stripped of her inheritance by her father who called her "too difficult to love," Isla has nothing left but her pride and a one-way ticket out of New York.
Then her mother remarries. To billionaire mogul Richard Steele.
Suddenly, Isla finds herself living under the same roof as Caspian Steele—Richard's eldest son, CEO of Steele Industries, and the most devastatingly gorgeous man she's ever wanted to slap. At thirty-one, Caspian is everything Isla despises: arrogant, cold, controlling, with eyes like winter storms that follow her everywhere she goes.
He makes it clear from day one: she's an interloper. A gold-digger's daughter who doesn't belong in his world. His contempt is palpable, his cruelty precise. Every family dinner is a battlefield where his cutting remarks leave her bleeding.
But late at night, when the mansion sleeps, Isla feels his presence outside her door. Catches him staring with something darker than hatred. Notices how his jaw clenches when other men look at her, how his hands fist when she laughs with anyone else.
The tension shatters one storm-drenched night when they're alone. The argument is vicious, the kiss more so. What follows is explosive, forbidden, and absolutely ruinous.
"This changes nothing," Caspian growls against her lips. "You're still the last woman I'd ever want."
But his actions betray his words. He becomes her shadow—obsessive, possessive, unable to stay away despite the rules, the family, the scandal waiting to destroy them both. Every stolen moment is gasoline on fire. Every touch is a promise of damnation.
When Isla's ex-fiancé returns, begging for forgiveness and revealing he was paid by her sister to leave her, Caspian's response is territorial and violent. When her father tries to force her into another arranged marriage to save his failing company, Caspian makes a ruthless move that shocks everyone: he announces Isla as his fiancée.
"She's mine," he declares to a room full of stunned witnesses. "She's always been mine."
But Isla isn't anyone's prize anymore. Not after everything she's survived. And when she discovers the truth about why Caspian hated her from the start—that he's been fighting their attraction since the moment they met, terrified of wanting his stepsister—she must decide: forgive the man who broke her, or walk away from the only person who's ever fought for her.
The forbidden never tasted this sweet. The line was never meant to be crossed. But some fires are too hot to resist.
