Never His Future, Only His Detour

For two years, Mai Tran was the best-kept secret in Delano — and she told herself that was almost the same thing as being loved. Priest was everything a careful woman knows to stay away from: a senior officer in the Blackvein MC, married eight years to Renata, one half of the golden couple the whole club held up as proof that a hard life could still look respectable. What nobody held up — what nobody was allowed to see — was Mai. The side road. The one he came to when the respectable main road went gray. He gave her the truest, rawest, realest part of himself, and he gave it to her in the dark, where it could never cost him anything. She let herself believe the detour was the destination. Because he made the side road feel like the only home she'd ever had. But there is a sign at the mouth of every road like that one, and Mai had been driving past it for two years with her eyes shut. WRONG WAY. The night she finally reads it — one more holiday spent alone while he plays golden husband across town — she turns the car around. She is done being a man's whole secret heart and his permanent nothing. She would rather be nobody's than be a secret. Priest is a man who worshipped his duty and called it honor — who married the right woman for the club and kept the wrong woman hidden and told himself the hiding was a kindness. Now the coward's arithmetic has finally failed him. He cannot beg her back and keep the sham too. If he wants Mai — really wants her — he has to blow up the whole dutiful life he built, end a marriage that was always a performance, and claim the outsider woman out loud, in front of the club, at ruinous cost, with no promise it wins him anything at all. An emotional, found-family motorcycle club other-woman-drama second-chance romance told from the other woman's point of view — a real, honestly-reckoned affair (no pretending it wasn't), a hollow marriage dissolved with dignity, a hard grovel that costs the hero everything he hid behind, and a woman who stops being anyone's detour and decides, from her own strength, whether she was ever the destination. Full-length novel with a guaranteed happily-ever-after.