The Don She Defied

Elena Sandoval has spent three years measuring the seagrass off Sardinia. She knows the bed is dying. She has the photographs to prove it. She also has a marriage certificate she never signed. Fabrizio Contini has owned this coastline longer than Elena has been alive. He doesn't want her research. He wants her alive, and the family code is the only thing that will do it — so he marries her in a county office and tells her afterward. She doesn't leave. She doesn't stop diving. She doesn't stop publishing. And when she traces the dredging to a pipeline that runs under four countries and through her own advisor's lab, she makes Fabrizio choose: his uncle, or the woman he married without asking. An age gap mafia arranged marriage romance set on a cliff, in salt water, in a family that was never hers.