She has picketed his resort. Publicly called him a planet-imploder. Refused, on principle, to shake his hand.
He just had his week-old daughter handed to him by a stranger in the resort lobby.
And the only woman he trusts with her is the one who hates him most.
Kyle Hicks has spent his entire adult life being someone else.
The penthouse. The tailored suits. A developer's empire stretched along the Northern California coast. A version of himself so polished, so successful, so expensive that no one would ever guess he'd spent his first fourteen years in a dilapidated trailer next to a pig farm in rural Oregon, known to every kid in school by one cruel name.
He buried that boy a long time ago — and on an ordinary Wednesday, a stranger walks into his lobby, hands him a week-old baby and a DNA test, and says: She's yours. Her mother is dead.
Kyle does not know how to hold a baby. He does not know how to mix a bottle. He does not know the first thing about keeping another human being alive — because he has always been certain, bone-deep, that he would be the last person on earth to trust with a child.
And the only person who can help him is the woman who has spent three years making his life a public, principled hell.
Violet Ellis does not like Kyle Hicks. She does not like what he builds, what he represents, or what he is slowly doing to the coastline she has loved since she was a girl. She is raising her brilliant, sensitive little boy on yoga classes, recycled fabric, a mountain of unpayable debt, and the absolute conviction that she will never need anything from a man like that.
Then the phone rings.
And the baby on the other end is one week old, and motherless, and not getting what she needs.
Violet has been disowned by her parents, abandoned by the man who fathered her son, and humiliated by the town where her boutique went under. But she has never in her life been able to walk away from a child who needs her.
Which is how she ends up, three hours later, swaddling a baby in the penthouse of the man she has publicly loathed — discovering, to her horror, that the ruthless developer she thought she knew is... afraid.
There is an envelope on his counter addressed to someone named Daniel Kyle Hickman. There is a sleek, too-attentive night nanny more interested in Kyle's private correspondence than in the baby. And there is something wary and unsettled happening in Kyle's face every time he looks at little Mollie Blue — as though he is terrified of being the wrong man for the job.
He is so sure he is the wrong man.
Violet is beginning to suspect he is exactly the right one.
What starts as a grudging arrangement becomes late-night feedings, whispered conversations over the bassinet, and a three-year-old named Dakota who has decided Kyle Hicks is his now. But Violet has a secret about her son's father that could blow their world apart. And Kyle has a past that will destroy everything he's built if it ever surfaces.
Marred is the fourth book in the Cliffside Bay series — an emotional, slow-burn, behind-closed-doors enemies-to-lovers romance featuring a surprise-baby hero hiding a past he's spent twenty years erasing, a single-mom environmentalist heroine with a mountain of debt and a secret of her own, a three-year-old who steals every scene, a motherless newborn who changes everything, a hidden-identity thread, a found family of ride-or-die friends, and a love story born of two people who thought they were too broken to be loved.
Because in Cliffside Bay, the hardest people to rescue are the ones who have never believed they deserved it.
And the bravest thing two broken hearts can do is finally let someone else see them whole.
