ISBN:  Unavailable

Category: Fiction / Fantasy / Romance

Page count: 271

<p>The line between obligation and desire, between revulsion and pleasure, had not just been blurred. It had been erased completely. (Blurring the Lines)</p><p>He was celebrating a victory that wasn’t his. And I was the traitorous architect of his joy. (The Joyful Lie)</p><p>He leaned in closer, his lips brushing against my earlobe. “Congratulations, Lily,” he murmured, his voice a venomous whisper. “We did it. (The Uncle)</p><p>He (our son) is my miracle and my curse, all wrapped in one beautiful, innocent package. (Epilog: One Year Later)</p><p>***</p><p>In a marriage built on a foundation of fierce, unwavering love, a quiet poison seeps into the cracks. For Lily Caldwell, her husband’s sorrow is a mirror to her own emptiness, a constant, aching reminder of the one thing their perfect love cannot create. Lucas, a man whose goodness is as vast as his grief, sees his worth wither with every passing month, his hope dwindling in the face of a silent, biological betrayal. Their bed, once a sanctuary of passion, becomes a sterile field where devotion is sown, but nothing is reaped, leaving the soil of their future barren and cold.</p><p>Into this silent despair walks a shadow, a solution cloaked in the familiar guise of family. Alex, Lucas’s brother, is a man forged from a different fire—sharp where his brother is soft, potent where his brother is wanting. He sees their pain not with sympathy, but with a predator’s clarity, recognizing a void he is uniquely equipped to fill. The proposition is not one of love, but of dark, clinical logic: a secret transaction in the flesh, a way to till the fallow ground and give his brother the heir he so desperately craves, a debt to be paid in the currency of Lily’s body.</p><p>And so, in the sun-drenched silence of an expensive downtown apartment, the pact is sealed. Here, in a place far from the loving gaze of her husband, her body becomes a garden for a secret planting. It is a place where shame and a terrifying, unwanted pleasure become tangled things, where the lines between revulsion and response are blurred by a masterful, forbidden touch. It is an act of profound betrayal disguised as the ultimate sacrifice, a sowing of seed in a field that belongs to another, promising a harvest of devastating lies.</p><p>The secret, once planted, begins to grow, a living thing nestled deep within her. Lily becomes a walking paradox, her belly swelling with her husband’s joy and another man’s legacy. She is a vessel of hope and a tomb of truth, her every loving smile a performance, every tender touch from her oblivious husband a fresh torment. She watches the light return to his eyes, knowing she is the one who put it there, but the cost is a shadow that follows her, a ghost that sleeps between them in their bed.</p><p>Now, the fruit of this forbidden union is born—a perfect son with his father’s eyes and his uncle’s smile. The secret is no longer a whisper in the dark; it is a living, breathing boy, a constant, beautiful reminder of a debt that can never be fully paid. Lily is forever bound to the two brothers who define her world: one by a love that is pure, the other by a sin that is consuming. She is the keeper of a truth that could either save or shatter them all, forever tending the ground where his brother’s seed was sown.</p><p><br></p><p>Contents:</p><p>The Hollow Echo—1</p><p>The Unspoken Truth—23</p><p>The Unthinkable Proposition—45</p><p>The Counter-Offer—65</p><p>The First Transaction—83</p><p>The Ghost in the Bed—113</p><p>Blurring the Lines—135</p><p>Dinner for Three—159</p><p>The Hunter’s Game—179</p><p>Escalation—195</p><p>The Two Pink Lines—211</p><p>The Joyful Lie—229</p><p>The Uncle—245</p><p>Epilogue: One Year Later—267</p>