the summers heat
THE SUMMER'S HEAT Volume One: The Unchosen
Emiliya "Liya" Ferrer has spent her whole life being the unchosen one — the reliable daughter, the quiet aunt's-helper, never the girl anyone fights for. When she returns to Seville to save her late father's flower shop, she expects a simple, invisible life. Instead, her shop is set on fire over a debt she never knew existed — and the man who saves her is the last person in the city she should trust.
Miles Ashworth-Vega runs the most feared crew in Seville from behind the wheel of a motorcycle garage. Cold, controlled, untouchable — until Liya. What she doesn't know is that Miles isn't the struggling mechanic he pretends to be. He's the hidden heir to a shipping empire he walked away from after his parents' murder, hiding in plain sight from the man who killed them.
He tells himself protecting Liya is just repayment of an old debt. It isn't. It's the first time in six years he's wanted something more than survival.
As Liya digs into her father's past, she uncovers a secret buried for thirty years: her father and Miles's mother once shared a life neither of them ever spoke of — one that makes Liya and Miles's connection far more dangerous, and far more inevitable, than either of them understood. A rival who blames Miles for his own father's death. An uncle presumed dead for six years, resurfacing with a claim on everything Miles owns. And behind them both, a politician who has spent three decades protecting a secret worth killing for.
Every step closer Liya and Miles get to the truth pulls them closer to each other — and closer to a war that could cost them everything they've only just started to want.
The Unchosen is a slow-burn, high-stakes romance about a woman who stops waiting to be picked and starts choosing for herself — and the dangerous, magnetic man who realizes too late that the debt he owed her family was never the real reason he couldn't stay away.
Volume One ends with Liya and Miles's enemies exposed but not destroyed, their families' hidden history laid bare, and Miles forced to choose between the empire he never wanted and the woman he's no longer willing to lose — setting up a Volume Two that raises the stakes from a private war to a public reckoning.