LOGINIris's POVI sent the message to Marcus before I lost my nerve.‘The kids are ready to meet you. I've talked to them about you and about their grandparents. You can set up any date from tomorrow onward. They're excited. I'll let them know whatever you decide.’I stared at the screen for a long moment before pressing send, my thumb hovering over the button like it might bite me. This was real. My children were about to meet their father, a man they had never known existed until a few days ago. A man who had been grieving them for six years without even knowing they were alive.The reply came almost immediately. Tomorrow works. I'll come to your place in the afternoon. Thank you for telling them, Elena. It means more than you know.I set the phone down and took a shaky breath. Tomorrow. My children were going to meet their father tomorrow. But first, they had to meet their grandparents, and we were already running late."Ava, hold still. Your hair isn't going to braid itself." I knelt b
Marcus’s POV The results had been in for three days, and I still hadn't found the right words to tell Rachel.It wasn't that I didn't want to. I did. She deserved to know everything, and I had promised myself after the disaster with Iris that I would never hide things from the people I loved. But the words kept sticking in my throat every time I tried to say them. I have twin children a boy and a girl. They're six years old and I just found out they exist.So I did what I always did when I needed to think. I took Rachel out to dinner.The restaurant was one of her favorites, a small Italian place tucked between a bookstore and a flower shop. The lighting was soft and the wine was good, and by the time the entrees arrived, I had almost convinced myself that tonight was the night. I would tell her about the kids and the DNA test and Iris's promise not to keep them from me. I would reassure her that nothing had changed between us, that she was still the woman I wanted to spend my life w
Iris’s POV They showed me my room. It was exactly as it must have been when I left, the same pale blue walls and the same books on the shelves and the same stuffed bear on the bed. I stood in the doorway and tried to feel something, some flicker of recognition that would connect me to this place and this life. But there was nothing. Just a hollow space where my memories should have been. "We never changed anything," my mother said from behind me. "We couldn't bring ourselves to pack it up. It felt like admitting you were really gone." I walked into the room and touched the bookshelf, running my fingers over the spines of books I didn't remember reading. There were photographs on the walls, pictures of a dark-haired girl smiling at the camera. She looked like me. She looked exactly like me. The photo albums came next. My mother pulled them out of a closet and we sat on the bed together, turning the pages slowly. Baby pictures and birthday parties and graduations. A lifetime of mom
Iris’s POV The DNA results came back the next morning.Marcus called while I was packing the twins' school lunches, his voice careful and controlled, the way it had been since I showed up at his doorstep asking for the truth. "They're mine," he said. "Ava and Noah are my children."I leaned against the kitchen counter and closed my eyes, letting the words settle over me. I had suspected as much from the moment I saw the dates in the tabloid articles, from the way the timeline matched the pregnancy I couldn't remember. But hearing it confirmed was something else entirely. My children had a father. A real father who had been grieving them for six years without knowing they existed."Are you still there?" Marcus asked."I'm here." I opened my eyes and stared at the lunchboxes on the counter. "I need time to get them ready. They're six years old, Marcus. They've never had a father figure except Adrian, and they're still adjusting to the move. I can't just spring this on them.""How much
Marcus's POVMarcus. My name is Elena Hart, and I think you might be right about who I am. I need to talk to you. I need to know the truth about my past.The message came through while I was in a meeting, and I stared at my phone for a solid thirty seconds before I remembered how to breathe. The words were simple and direct, the kind of message a person sent when they had run out of other options. I excused myself from the meeting and walked to my office, closing the door behind me before I read the message again. She was reaching out. After weeks of silence and distance and the careful pretense that we were strangers, she was finally asking for the truth. The relief that flooded through me was so intense it made my hands shake.Then I thought about Rachel, and the relief curdled into something more complicated.I drove home that evening with the message still open on my phone, trying to figure out how to tell the woman I loved that my ex-wife had contacted me. Rachel was in the kitc
Elena's POVThe photographs on my laptop screen had burned themselves into the back of my eyelids, and sleep had become a thing that happened to other people. I had been lying in bed for hours with the covers pulled up to my chin and the laptop glowing on the nightstand, the articles still open to the pages I had read and reread until the words blurred together. Iris Hale. The forbidden romance author who had an affair with her father-in-law. The woman who had been married to Marcus Hale and pregnant with his child when she disappeared. The woman whose face looked exactly like mine.I couldn't stop thinking about her parents. Somewhere in this city, a couple had buried their daughter six years ago. They had stood over an empty coffin and wept for a child they believed was gone forever. They had aged and grieved and carried the weight of their loss while I lived in another city under a different name, raising twins and building a career and never once wondering if there were people out
Iris’s POV His fingers tightened around my throat. “I know.” The words came out low, steady, and far too calm for the way his hands were pressing into my skin. I clawed at his wrists, my nails digging in, my body twisting beneath him as I tried to pull free. “I know what you’ve been doing.” My
Iris’s POV I woke up with a jolt. The dream had been hazy but vivid enough to leave me throbbing. There were dark eyes watching me, a low magnetic voice murmuring praise against my throat and strong hands sliding up my thighs with slow deliberate purpose. I had arched into the touch in the dream d
Iris’s POV The drive home felt longer than it should have. Marcus had the radio tuned to that low jazz station he likes, humming off-key while he scrolled emails at red lights. I stared out the passenger window, watching streetlights smear past, but my brain was still stuck on the terrace. I cou
Iris’s POV I should have known from the day I met my fiancé’s father that I would end up sleeping with him. The attraction was so fierce and it was obvious it went both ways. I didn’t go out of my way to seek him out and I even avoided him, but there was no escaping this. I write romance for







