After the CEO Dumped Me, He Came Crawling Back
At nineteen, Elise Jones failed her ninety-ninth attempt to escape an arranged marriage.
On the eve of being forced to wed an older man, she ran into the arms of Merrick Grant, the once-promising heir who had exiled himself from Crown City to a forgotten border town.
Elise knew another woman had once held his heart, but it didn’t matter to her.
She only wanted a way out—someone strong enough to pull her from the life that was swallowing her whole.
What began as raw survival turned into months spent wrapped in each other’s lives.
When the time came, he brought her back to Crown City, the glittering, intoxicating world he’d once abandoned.
No one knew that the polished, silver-spoon heir of the Grant family had spent month after month living with her in a shabby rental apartment, worlds away from the life that once revolved around him.
Elise retook her exams, reclaimed her top-student title, and began rebuilding the future she once dreamed of.
But the night before Merrick and his first love were set to announce their engagement, Elise was forced out of Crown City and stripped of everything she had fought so hard to earn.
Years later, they crossed paths again in New Harbor.
She walked past him with another man’s hand in hers.
That night, a Maybach stood parked beneath her apartment until dawn, while message after message lit up her phone.
He wrote:
“Elise, it was only ever you.”
Elise had grown up with nothing, yet she never bowed to fate. She seized every chance to change her destiny with both hands.
From the moment they met, Merrick was drawn to that fierce, unyielding spark—an instinct that pulled him in and a clarity that undid him.
She was a cactus rising through desert sand, a wild rose he nurtured with his own hands, and the woman who had always lived at the center of his heart.