She’d been unexpected. A path I hadn’t thought I’d take. But once she was on my radar, there was no turning back. Being deceptive was part of my job as a DEA agent, but I’d learned how to deceive people a long time before that. I’d been deep undercover for nine months. Nine months away from the self-made family I’d been accepted into. Nine months of losing myself in a world I’d grown up in. Nine months of forgetting who I was. But all it took was one action to springboard me back into the real world. Belle wasn’t meant to walk into the club of a cartel boss. She wasn’t meant to fall into my arms—literally. But there she was, the girl I’d known since she took her first breath. The girl who had grown into a woman people couldn’t take their eyes off. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was protecting her from the evil surrounding us. I thought kissing her and getting her out of there was the only option to keep her safe. It didn’t matter that her lips pressed against mine roared a fire to life within me. It didn’t matter that there was a twenty-two year age gap. It didn’t matter that she was my bosses daughter. All that mattered was that she was safe. Until she wasn’t. I vowed to protect her with my life. I promised she wouldn’t get hurt. But I hadn’t factored her feelings into it. Belle was forbidden fruit I hadn’t been able to resist, and now there was no going back. Bonds weren’t meant to be broken, but ours had been torn apart irrecoverably.