"She's ours."
The ocean brought her. Half-drowned. Barely breathing. Mine.
I don't question the gods. I never have. But when my men pull this pale, trembling woman from the surf, something shifts in my chest that has never moved before. Not in fifty-two years. Not once.
She's terrified. She's furious. She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And she has no idea what she just washed into.
Mara Sullivan had one plan: survive the shipwreck, find a way home, salvage what's left of her academic career. She didn't plan on being carried out of the ocean by the most commanding man she's ever seen. She didn't plan on being kept. On being fed by his hands every single day. On slowly, impossibly, starting to want it.
Chief Koa has waited twenty years for the gods to send him the right woman. He refused arranged matches. Refused political marriages. Refused to settle. Then a storm dropped her on his beach—thin, sharp-tongued, brilliant, and so clearly broken by the world she came from that he wants to take it apart piece by piece.
He's patient. He's certain. And he has no intention of ever letting her go.
She tells herself she's a researcher. An observer. That none of this is real. That the weight she's gaining means nothing. That the way he looks at her—like she was made specifically for him—means nothing.
But the island doesn't lie. And neither does her body.
Can a man who has never doubted his destiny convince a woman who has never trusted anyone to stay—not because she has to, but because she wants to? Will Mara find that everything she was starving for was never in a lecture hall at all? And when he finally gives her the one thing she never expected—a real choice—will she take it?
Tropes:
•Dark Romance - Age Gap (25F/52M)
•Captive/Kept Woman
•Possessive Older Hero
•Breeding Kink
•Forced Feeding / Weight Gain Appreciation
•Enemies to Lovers
•She Fell First (She Just Won't Admit It)
Content Warning: This book contains dubious consent, captivity, explicit sexual content, breeding themes, and Stockholm syndrome elements. For adult readers only (18+).
