Falling for the Wrong King

The pass gate came down in a whiteout, and the Land Cruiser that pulled up out of the storm carried the one man Ingrid Melancon had spent three years learning to forecast around. Emory Guidry had a way of arriving like weather she should have seen coming. He did not know that the little girl asleep in the back of her own life two miles up the mountain had his stillness and his eyes.

Three years ago Ingrid was a snow-safety forecaster with her father's debt on her back, and the table settled that debt by promising her to a rival. Emory, older and colder and the last man she was allowed to want, was assigned to guard her until the wedding. What they did instead was the one thing the code did not forgive, and when it went wrong he broke her in public and let her run, and never told her he did it to keep her and the child she was carrying alive.

Now the old don is dying, the mountain is loaded, and Emory is back. He learns in the space of one breath that he has a daughter, and that knowing her costs him nothing he is not finally willing to pay. Ingrid has read enough snow to know that the dangerous layer is the one you buried and told yourself had healed. She will not be handled and she will not be told what she felt. She sets the terms, and she watches to see whether a man who has only ever held things by force can stand on the slope he loaded and let it go.

To have an hour he does not own, Emory gives up the crown, the pass, the protection, the whole cold kingdom he bled for, until there is nothing left in his hands and no reason she could choose him except the true one. Some men rule. This one has to lose the mountain to deserve the woman on it.

A full-length, standalone forbidden age-gap mafia romance told in two timelines, then and now, in dual point of view, with a secret child, a long and costly grovel, and a heroine who never once mistakes force for safety.