Heir To His Heart

Six years ago, Adele Moore walked out of her father's house at nineteen years old with nothing but the child she refused to give up. No money. No plan. No family willing to claim her. She survived anyway, the way women like her always survive — quietly, stubbornly, at tremendous personal cost. She built a life out of shelter beds and borrowed rooms and flower stands on cold corners, and she raised a son who trusted the world more than it had ever given him reason to, and she told herself that was enough.

Then Brad ran into traffic. Then a black car stopped. Then a stranger knelt beside her bleeding son on a city sidewalk and looked at his face in a way she would not understand until she was already inside his house, already across the breakfast table from him every morning, already watching her son say his name like it was the most natural conclusion in the world.

Heston DeLeon is a billionaire. He is controlled, guarded, and in possession of a DNA result that tells him exactly who Brad Moore is. He has known since the sidewalk. He hired her knowing. He buys every flower she has left on a slow Wednesday evening and tells himself it is for the dining room.

What Heston does not yet know is what to do about the woman who walked in with nothing and has somehow become the fixed point his entire carefully ordered life has been orbiting without his permission.

Between them: one secret kept for seven years, a socialite who will stop at nothing to remove Adele from the picture, a family contract drawn up before either of them existed as anything to each other, a pregnancy neither of them planned, a birth mother who has been searching for twenty-five years, and a seven-year-old boy who saw the truth long before the adults in his life were ready to speak it.

Adele has survived everything the world has thrown at her. She is not afraid of hard things.

She is only afraid of this: that she might let herself want it. That she might let herself believe. That she might open the last defended door and find, on the other side, the thing she stopped letting herself hope for at nineteen years old in a father's study with the door closing behind her.

Heir to His Heart is a full-length contemporary romance about pride and tenderness, about the families you are born into and the ones you choose, about a woman who came from nothing and turned out to have come from love all along.

For readers who believe the best stories are the ones where the heroine earns every word of her happy ending — and so does everyone who loves her.