Pricked

All I wanted was a tattoo.What I got was a broody, enigmatic demigod with an electrifying touch and a mysterious past.We were night and day in every way possible, not an ounce of anything in common, and yet, I wanted him in the worst way.It didn't matter that he was emotionally unavailable or that he was exactly the kind of man who would give my father a coronary should I dare to bring him home. It didn't matter that his heart was wrapped in barbed wire or that he made me promise never to fall for him.None of it mattered because he was the most perfectly imperfect, beautifully tortured soul I'd ever known, and I was besotted, addicted to all the thrilling and wondrous ways he made me feel when we were together.They say a single moment can change the entire trajectory of your life. But looking back, I never could have imagined all the ways my world would change the moment it collided with his. He said it would only hurt a little ... On her 16th birthday, Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel. On my 22nd, I pricked mine on the needle of a tattoo machine wielded by a beautifully complicated man who would go on to become my ruin. Madden Ransom was a lot of things. Unfeeling. Opinionated. Rebellious. A tattoo artist with no tattoos, the man was an enigma and then some. And while Sleeping Beauty fell into a peaceful slumber as she awaited true love's kiss, I fell into something else entirely - my heart in the hands of a man who'd never given nor received anything remotely like love. I know now that when Madden told me it would only hurt a little ... he didn't mean the tattoo. It turns out you can't un-love someone, even after you find out he's the last person you have any business loving. And that is the most painful truth of all. Or it was ... until his last confession The words "For Lila, forever" adorned the front of the envelope in blue ink, the handwriting all too familiar. But it didn't matter what it said. I didn't have the heart to open it. We couldn't be together. Not after everything ... Leaving Rose Crossing, Maine was one of the most painful moments of my life-or at least it was until the day I came face-to-face with Thayer Ainsworth again. After a decade of searching, he's found me, and he wants to know why I quit my housemaid job and left his family's island estate without so much as a goodbye. But I'm bound by a devastating secret much bigger than the two of us, and telling him the truth has consequences. Looking into the eyes of the only man I've ever loved, I tell him the only thing I'm allowed to: never contact me again. And when he's gone, I sit down and finally open his letter. Only it isn't a letter at all. And it changes everything