Endelin Starh
Cassandra Hayes is a nineteen-year-old college student balancing school, a part-time job at a flower shop, and caring for her aging grandmother. Her life is ordinary, predictable, and painfully small until a routine delivery goes disastrously wrong.
Sent to the Gold Coast with an arrangement of white orchids, Cassandra arrives at the wrong address and stumbles upon the aftermath of a violent confrontation. Bullet holes riddle the walls. Furniture lies shattered. And a deep, dangerous voice demands to know who's there.
She flees. She thinks she's safe. But the black SUV waiting outside her apartment tells a different story.
Dante Moretti is twenty-eight, cold, calculating man and the head of an empire built on both legal and illegal foundations. When a delivery girl witnesses something she shouldn't, he should eliminate the threat. Instead, he's drawn to her in ways he doesn't understand.
Then he sees the necklace she wears, a pendant that belonged to her mother, a woman he helped twenty years ago. A woman who died hiding evidence that could destroy powerful men.
Cassandra is no longer invisible. Enemies who killed her mother now want her dead. To protect her, Dante makes a shocking decision, he claims she's his fiancée.
What begins as protection becomes entanglement. Cassandra is thrust into a world of luxury, danger, and family secrets. Dante's parents despise her. His aunt torments her. And the truth about her parents' past threatens to tear everything apart.
As the fake engagement blurs into something real, Cassandra must decide if she can trust the man who's both her protector and her captor. And Dante must confront the one thing he's never allowed himself to feel. Love.
Because in Dante world, love is not safe. And Cassandra might be the missing piece that destroys him or finally sets him free.
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