Total pages in book: 37
Estimated words: 36268 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 181(@200wpm)___ 145(@250wpm)___ 121(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 36268 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 181(@200wpm)___ 145(@250wpm)___ 121(@300wpm)
In the distance, an engine roared to life, Aivan driving away from another confrontation he couldn’t win with logic alone.
Miguel picked up the list, smoothing out the smudge where his son’s thumb had betrayed him. Eight names. Seven strategic alliances.
One wild hope.
He reached for his phone to text Olivio. Your brother needs us united on this. No funding outside official channels.
Olivio: The Posada girl?
Even from Toronto, his younger son saw everything. Always had.
Miguel: Maybe. Selena thinks so.
Olivio: Then it’s already decided. That woman could convince water to flow uphill.
Miguel smiled despite the ache in his chest. His boys. So different, yet both shaped by loss in their own ways. Olivio had turned outward, charming the world into submission. Aivan had turned inward, building walls so high even the wings of angels might not be strong enough to soar past it.
But Selena was right. She usually was.
Sometimes love crept in through cracks you didn’t know existed.
Sometimes it had been there all along, waiting for the right pressure to make itself known.
And sometimes a father had to play the villain to save his son from a lifetime of the very coldness that had nearly destroyed them both.
The list lay on his desk like a declaration of war. Or maybe, if they were lucky, a white flag of surrender to the one force even a Cannizzaro couldn’t control.
Outside, the roses bloomed wild in the dying light. Thorns and beauty and twenty-three years of untended growth. And somewhere in Monaco, his eldest son was about to discover that the heart he’d buried at five years old had never stopped beating.
It had just been waiting.
Waiting for someone who already knew how to tend wild gardens.
Someone who understood that the most beautiful things often grew in the spaces between order and chaos.
Someone who’d been there all along, invisible as heartbreak, patient as prayer.
Chapter Two
SIENAH POSADA LEARNED the art of invisibility the day she and her mother moved into the Cannizzaro compound. Sixteen years old, all knees and elbows and dreams too big for a housekeeper’s daughter, she’d promised herself she’d be nothing but professional. A ghost who cleaned. A shadow who served.
That resolution lasted exactly forty-seven minutes.
Because that’s when Aivan Cannizzaro walked through the front door, still in his racing suit from practice, smelling like burnt rubber and expensive cologne and pure, distilled trouble. Twenty-five years old. Already making headlines. Already breaking hearts across three continents.
Already making her forget her own name.
“You’re new,” he said, those dark eyes sliding over her once before dismissing her entirely.
Not a question. Just an observation filed away with all the other household changes he’d catalog and forget by dinner.
“Sì, signore. I’m Sienah. Lynnette’s daughter.”
He was already walking away, peeling off his gloves, tossing them on the console table she’d just polished. The leather left marks. She’d have to clean it again.
She didn’t mind. In fact, she spent an embarrassing amount of time later touching those exact marks, wondering if they were still warm from his hands.
Pathetic? Yes. Did she care? Not even a little.
What followed were three years of exquisite torture wrapped in Egyptian cotton sheets and served with perfectly brewed espresso. Three years of watching him move through the world like he owned it, which he essentially did. Three years of memorizing every detail about a man who looked through her like she was made of glass.
At first, she was just confused by her own reactions. Why did her stomach flip when he entered a room? Why did her hands shake when she collected his coffee cups? Why did she find herself volunteering for every task that might put her in his vicinity?
“You’re hovering,” Mama observed one day when Sienah had cleaned the same mirror three times because Aivan was on the phone in the next room.
“I just want to make sure...”
“The master’s son hasn’t found himself a date?”
Since that was exactly she had been worried about but would never admit to it, she had instead mumbled an excuse about having to clean in another room.
By seventeen, confusion had evolved into full-blown infatuation with a side of mortification. She’d started noticing things she had no business noticing. Like how his racing suits clung to his thighs. How his hands looked working on an engine. How his hair curled slightly when damp from the shower.
She learned his patterns with the dedication of a scholar studying for the most important exam of her life. He woke at 5:47 every morning, not 5:45 or 6:00 but 5:47 exactly. She knew because she’d started setting her alarm for 5:30 just to make sure his coffee would be perfect when he came down.
He took it strong enough to wake the dead but with exactly one sugar cube, never two. She’d spent a week testing different roasts until she found the one that made him pause mid-sip and actually look at the cup with something like approval.