Description

Fire Chief Dorian Hayde answers a routine callout to Rendezvous Ridge and finds a woman floating in a bathtub while the basement burns around her. She isn’t dead. She’s holding her breath, and the first thing she asks of the man who saves her is to tell everyone she didn’t make it. The woman is DeCarla Walters, a millionaire swimming champion and yacht owner, and the person who locked her in that basement on the morning of her own wedding shares her face. Her twin sister has stepped into her life, her fiancé is in on it, and the only people DeCarla can trust are the fire chief hiding her in his house, his brother the police commissioner, and a lawyer named Matt who plans a fake funeral like he’s ordering lunch.

The suspense plot moves fast: a frozen estate, a fingerprint trap at the bank, a staged confession. But the heart of the story is what happens inside Dorian’s house while DeCarla waits it out. She has never trusted a man with anything, and now she’s trusting a near-stranger with her life. The romance runs hot and open on the page, which is where the 18+ marker on this listing comes from. Expect quick chapters, Caribbean island texture, a villain twin who gets a rough dose of poetic justice, and an ending that ties everything off with a wedding cruise. It’s pulpy, direct, and done in one sitting.

For readers who like their romance with a body that refuses to stay dead.