November Road

Nova Jane found love at a young age, but as those things sometimes go, they took different directions in life. Nova married Rob and has been living a life she can't seem to escape. One where every decision feels like a minefield of Robs' moods, and anything can set him off. She fantasizes about her first love to get through the abuse until she can save enough money to get out. It was then that she was happy and carefree. It helps to daydream about it, but it also hurts that it's forever beyond her reach.

A blizzard had buried the mountain, turning every road into a death trap. Locals called it Deadman's Pass—seventy-two icy switchbacks with zero room for error. As the only person who had ever made it through without a scratch, I'd just gotten a million-dollar rescue call from beyond the final curve. Ten years ago, I went there once. My seventeen-year-old daughter, Maya, was skydiving with her classmates when a violent air current forced an emergency landing. The rescue came too late. She died there. Later, I learned my husband, Jayden Boone, had ignored Maya's safety. He poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the rescue effort and redirected every team to save his ex's daughter instead. The girl had only sprained her ankle on a hiking trip. The day Maya died, I walked away from my career as a professor and stayed here, living as a broke driver. I risked my life running Deadman's Pass again and again until I knew every turn by heart. In the ten years since, no one else had died on that road. Today, a friend shoved a million-dollar rescue job in front of me and told me to leave right away. I looked at the face in the photo—the one I could never forget. Then I smiled and tossed my keys onto the table. "I can't take this job."

By the seventh year of my engagement to Tristan, he postponed our wedding for the third time. The reason was simple. His childhood sweetheart, Gabriella, had returned to the country. She had just gone through a divorce and was emotionally unstable. Tristan personally retrieved every invitation we had sent out, his tone calm and steady. "Gabby has no one by her side right now. I can't upset her at a time like this." I held the ring that had already been resized twice and asked, "What about me?" Tristan glanced at me. "You're different. You're sensible." I had been hearing that word for seven years. Sensible. When his startup failed, I sold the old house my grandmother had left me to help him pay off his debts. When he suffered a gastric hemorrhage, I stayed at the hospital for three days straight and missed my own promotion defense. When his mother said my background was too ordinary for him, he only rubbed his temples and said, "Tori, don't make this difficult for me." Every time, I nodded. He once told me that no matter how thick the fog became, he would always leave a light on for me. Until the day Gabriella stood in front of the mirror wearing my wedding dress and smiled as she asked, "Victoria, you don't mind, do you? Tristan said your wedding's being postponed anyway." Tristan stood behind her. He did not deny it. He even reached out and adjusted her veil for her. The fog lamp he had given me with his own hands sat by the display window of the bridal shop. It was still lit, illuminating someone else in the white dress I had waited seven years to wear. Only then did I realize that some roads were not lost because the fog was too thick. It was because he had never planned to come for me at all.

He watched her grow up. Now he can't stop watching her. Ayana Marcus came home for Christmas expecting family dinners and small-town boredom. What she didn't expect was Nelson Ward looking at her like she was something he'd been starving himself of for twenty years. He's forty-five. She's twenty-four. He's her father's best friend, the town's moral compass, a man who hasn't touched a woman since his fiancée died and took every good thing in him with her. She's the pastor's daughter. The good girl. The one who was never supposed to want something this dangerous. One kiss changes everything. Now she's sleeping in his bed, her father won't speak to her, the whole town is watching — and Nelson Ward, who spent two decades convincing himself he didn't deserve happiness, is learning what it costs to finally take it. Some men are worth the scandal. Some Decembers are worth burning everything down. UNHOLY DECEMBER — because the most sacred thing she ever did was love a man everyone told her was forbidden.

He's a rockstar, a badboy celebrity who only wants to have fun. She's a nobody, stranded in a foreign country, who only wants to go home. A storm brings them together in the middle of nowhere. A one-night stand that will change their lives forever.

After a tragic accident erases her memory of the last five years — including her marriage — a woman wakes up believing she’s still engaged to the man she loved in college… not the husband who would die for her. But what if she fell in love with her husband for a reason she no longer remembers? And what if the truth about their love story is darker than she thinks?