Unholy December
They called him Father. She called him forbidden.
Ayana Marcus thought coming home for Christmas would be simple—a few weeks of family dinners, church services, and small-town nostalgia before returning to her real life in Boston.
She didn't expect him.
Father Nelson has been her father's best friend for two decades. A priest. A pillar of their tight-knit community. A man who's supposed to be untouchable, unshakeable, holy. But when Ayana returns after four years away—no longer the sheltered girl who left, but a woman who knows her own mind—everything changes.
One look across her family's dinner table, and she sees it: the way his dark eyes linger a second too long, the tension in his jaw when she speaks, the white-knuckled grip on his glass when she laughs. Father Nelson isn't just her father's friend anymore.
He's a man on the edge of breaking.
One stolen kiss beneath the mistletoe shatters two decades of self-control. What begins as a single moment of weakness spirals into a secret affair that threatens to destroy everything—his priesthood, her family, their souls.
He tells himself he's corrupting her. She knows she's awakening him.
In the cold December nights, between whispered prayers and desperate touches, they discover that some sins taste like salvation. That the line between worship and desire is thinner than either imagined. That love—even forbidden, impossible, unholy love—can be the most sacred thing of all.
But in a town where secrets don't stay buried and the church sees everything, their passion will cost them more than they ever imagined.
He's twice her age. Her father's best friend. A man of God.
She's everything he's denied himself for twenty years.
And this December, they'll learn that some gifts are too dangerous to unwrap…
But impossible to resist.