KARIA

A cheating fiance.

A controlling father.

A life-changing illness.

Can a break from the past bring lasting happiness in the future?

***

When twenty-nine year old Karia Bailey suffers a heart attack and discovers that her fiance of three years has been cheating, she knows everything has to change.

So she leaves New York and retreats to Basil Bay, a tropical, Central American island . It was the most peaceful place she'd ever been. And above all, peace was what Karia needed now. Peace to unravel the mystery that had become her life.

"A seemingly healthy young woman doesn't just suffer a heart attack at twenty-nine because everything in her life is 'fine,' as you insist. If you don't figure out the underlying issues and do something about them, you could be dead before you're thirty-five."

Those words from her therapist shook Karia to her core. She'd spent her whole life with an overbearing, cold-hearted father who refused to even give her so much as a crumb of information about the woman who'd given birth to her.

As she begins digging into the darkened halls of her life, Karia discovers that life often hid more than it revealed – unless you were willing to dig up long-buried secrets and expose them to the light of truth. For that she needed the space to develop courage and act on it. And that's what the peace of Basil Bay offered.

Until Zendan Cage.

He was a mirror of everything Karia never had, and everything she ever wanted. Powerful, handsome and all-consuming, he blew into her life like a category five hurricane: suddenly, forcefully, insistently.

"No matter how much you may want to deny it, this happened," Zen insisted. "I can't enter a room without wanting to bury myself in you. And the way your body responds to mine, I know you feel the same. So for now, I'll go Karia. But don't you think for one minute that it's over between us. It'll never be over," he said, and ground his lips into hers.

Zendan Cage disturbed her peace, demanding the very piece of her that she was unwilling to give – her heart. Even when it screamed that she was ...

His for the Taking.