$78. That was all Rowan Pierce had left when the blizzard hit the Colorado mountains that December night. She stood behind the bar of Northstar Lodge, counting crumpled bills by lamplight while a foreclosure notice on the counter demanded $22,000 in twelve days.
The lodge had been her mother’s dying wish, a little mountainside refuge in the United States where travelers could find warmth and coffee after long drives through the snow.
Her husband, Garrett, had secretly mortgaged it to pay for the treatments that couldn’t save her mother, then perished in a wildfire two years ago, leaving Rowan a widow, a mother, and buried in debts she’d never known existed. In the back room, her eight-year-old son, Micah, slept beneath a star-patterned quilt, the last gift from a father he barely remembered.
Her phone screen glowed with a message from Preston Mercer. Time’s running out, Mrs.
Pierce.
We can settle this quietly, or the courts will do it publicly. Your reputation still matters, doesn’t it? She killed the screen, jaw clenched, swearing that Mercer, a vulture hiding behind a polished Denver office and a manicured smile, would never own what her family had built.
Then engines roared through the storm.
Not one vehicle. A convoy.
Fifteen black SUVs cutting through the whiteout like wolves descending on wounded prey. Headlights carved tunnels in the wind-driven snow as they pulled up in front of the lodge.
The lead door opened and a man emerged, tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a cashmere coat that probably cost more than her debt.
Snow-dusted dark hair silvered at the temples. A faint scar traced from his left eye to his cheekbone. His voice carried over the wind like distant thunder.
“We need shelter,” he called.
“Fifteen people. Roads are sealed.”
Rowan faced him across the threshold, one hand on the doorknob, her body blocking the entrance.
Seventy-eight dollars to her name. A sleeping child behind her.
Fifteen strangers demanding entry in the middle of an American blizzard.
She didn’t know this man was Salvatore Moreno, whose name made powerful men go pale in cities she had only ever seen on the news. She didn’t know he’d spent ten years turning grief into an empire after failing to save his seventeen-year-old sister from kidnappers. She only knew the storm was killing, and she had to choose.
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