Semua Bab ROUGH TRADE: Bab 11 - Bab 20

The warehouse sat between them in the days that followed, a thing neither of them named. Cruz started reaching for her hand in the car, thumb tracing her knuckles, a gesture he'd never made before. He cooked for her three nights running, elaborate meals that kept him at the stove and off the phone. When he caught her watching him across the kitchen he'd go still, then smile, but the smile never quite reached his eyes. Nina found herself touching him more, a hand on his back when she passed, her head on his chest in the dark, holding on a little longer than she used to, as if she could press the truth out of him through her skin if she just held tight enough.It was in that mood that he brought up his family.Cruz took her to meet his family on a Sunday, the kind of ordinary thing that made her stomach churn with guilt because she wasn't ordinary and neither was he, and these people would never know what sat at their table.His mother Pilar lived in a

They sat in Nina's apartment with the takeout going cold on the counter and the truth hanging between them like smoke. Marsh told Cruz who Nina was. Cruz told Nina who he was. Nobody raised their voice. That was almost worse. "You're a cop," Cruz said. He said it flat, the way a man says a thing he's already figured out but needs to hear spoken aloud to believe it. He looked at Nina, and she watched him put it together, every moment, every night, every time she'd asked a question, every time she'd let him inside her. "The whole time." "The whole time," she said, because there was no point lying now, because the lie was dead and the truth was all that was left. He laughed, soft and broken, and pressed his palms to his eyes, and Nina felt the sound of it like a blade between her ribs. "And the baby?" "Yours. Ours." Marsh cleared his throat, uncomfortable, a man caught between duty and the woman he'd

Damián Rojas found them in three days.They came back from a supply run in the nearest town to find the safehouse door hanging open, the inside torn apart, the furniture overturned, their supplies scattered. Cruz shoved Nina behind him, drew the gun he kept in the small of his back, and cleared the house room by room, professional, thorough. Empty. But on the kitchen table, laid out neatly in the middle of the wreckage, a note in a sharp, cruel hand:*You took something of mine, Navarro. Now I'll take something of yours.*A photo paper-clipped to it. Nina, taken from behind, walking into the precinct two months ago, clear as day. She hadn't known anyone was watching. Damián had known what she was before Cruz had."He's been onto you longer than I have," Cruz said, his voice flat and deadly, his eyes scanning the desert outside the window. "He's been waiting. Letting me think I was the one hunting.""What does he want?""Me.

They landed in Mazatlan with forged papers Cesar had arranged, new names that felt strange in Nina's mouth. Elena and Carlos Mendez. They checked into a hotel on the malecon, the oceanfront promenade where the waves crashed against the seawall and the stone benches were worn smooth by decades of fishermen and lovers and old men watching the sunset, and tried to breathe, and for two weeks it almost felt like a life.They walked the beach at dawn, ate ceviche at a plastic table under a tarp at a place called El Faro where the fish was caught that morning and the lime was sharp and bright, slept tangled together with the balcony door open to the sound of the waves. Cruz was gentle with her, attentive, his hand always finding the curve of her stomach, his mouth on her skin each morning. He talked about the future in a way he never had before, about a house by the water, about quiet, about his child knowing a different life than he had, about being the man his daughter dese

Hi, reader.If you made it all the way to this page, thank you. Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart — you spent your time with characters I built out of nothing but stubbornness and a laptop, and that is not a small thing to give someone. I don't take it for granted, ever.A quick note for anyone who wandered in without the warning up front: this book is adult romance, explicit, and entirely fictional. Everything in these pages — the heat, the tension, the messier feelings, all of it — exists to entertain consenting adult readers who want a story that doesn't fade to black at the good part. If that's you, welcome. You're exactly who I'm writing for.Writing romance — the steamy, unapologetic, adult kind — is genuinely the thing I love most. I love slow burns that make you yell at your screen. I love the moment two characters stop pretending they don't want each other. I love writing the tension right up until it snaps, and then writing what happens after. This genre gets dismissed