Where Hate Learned to Love

Bernadette Prejean met the man who burned her family's landing with a shotgun already leveled at his chest, and she meant every inch of it. He had thrown the first bottle. Her father went back into the fire for the queens and the record books and never got his heart to settle again, and he was in the ground three weeks later. Now Colton Zaragoza was standing on her rebuilt dock in a good jacket, offering help she would rather die than take.

Bernadette keeps bees. She floats her hives up the Apalachicola to the white tupelo bloom for the one honey in the world that will not crystallize, that stays clear and gold for years if you never once let it be adulterated. She learned young what her father taught her: the jar you keep honest is the jar that lasts. The man on her dock is the opposite of honest, and she has a four-year-old girl asleep in the house whose eyes she has spent four years refusing to think about.

Colton came to take the honey co-op for the family and stayed to protect the woman who hates him, and he cannot say why the little girl on the landing stops his breath. He only knows he will burn the whole organization down before he lets it take one more thing from her. Told in both their voices, enemy and enemy, this is the story of two people forced onto the same boat by a worse threat than each other, and of the truth each is hiding that will either set like bad honey or stay clear.

To earn a place he has no right to, Colton gives up the family, the name, the protection, everything the shadow of the Zaragozas ever bought him, and stands on the landing he ruined with empty hands. Some men take what they want. This one had to lose all of it, and tell the whole truth, before the woman he wronged would even look at what was left.

A full-length, standalone enemies-to-lovers mafia romance in dual point of view, with a secret child, a slow burn from real hatred to earned love, and a beekeeper heroine who never once mistakes sweetness for safety.