Heat Among the Wicked

Synopsis

Scarlett Reeves was once the most dazzling mixed-race socialite on New York's Upper East Side. After her father's business empire collapsed, she staked all her chips on her marriage to her fiancé Julian Blackwell. The night before the wedding, she pushed open the door to the hotel suite and found Julian tangled naked with her best friend Bianca on the white bedsheets; three years of love shattered into glass shards in five seconds. She smashed her engagement ring into the cheater's face, ran barefoot into the torrential rain, stumbled into a neon-lit bar, and downed four shots of tequila. A strange man with gray eyes sat down beside her—no comfort, no covetousness, just a glass of water and a dry joke. When dawn broke, she woke up in an unfamiliar room, only to discover that the man was Adrian Blackwell III, Julian's own uncle and the true hidden power behind the Blackwell family. Adrian put forward a wild deal: marry him in a flash within seventy-two hours, she would step back into the Blackwell family table as his aunt to help him seize power within the clan, and after one year she could get a clean divorce plus enough money to rebuild her father's business. Scarlett thought she was manipulating the game, until she found that Adrian's approach to her was no accident—his former fiancée Catherine had died ten years ago in a carefully faked car crash, and the person who killed Catherine was hiding inside the Blackwell family. The honey coffee at 3 a.m., the second cup bought in advance in the cabinet, the three words engraved on the inner wall of the ring: "Not a contract"—a real heartbeat grew out of the fake marriage. When Marco Vidal, a man who had been secretly in love with her since high school, burst into this war with fatal evidence and even more fatal tenderness, Scarlett was trapped in a marriage that started as revenge, only to find that what really trapped her was not the contract, but the wildly beating heart that she could no longer hide.