Author’s POV
“I’m being blackmailed,” Alessandra told Daniel when he finally agreed to meet her for lunch, her voice trembling just enough to sound convincing.
Daniel arched a brow in surprise, his hand pausing midway to his glass of water. “Blackmailed? How? By who?”
When she’d called him earlier, her voice tight with urgency, this was not the news he’d expected to hear. He had assumed—wrongly, it seemed—that this lunch would be another attempt to pull him into an emotional conversation he had already shut down more times than he cared to count.
He had come prepared to remind her, gently but firmly, that nothing would ever happen between them again. Not now. Not ever.
Alessandra was his first love. The mother of his child. A woman who had once meant everything to him. But that chapte
