The Hawthorn Inheritance

Clara Whitmore is not a blushing bride. She is a chameleon, a survivor, and a woman running from a past that taught her one lesson: hunt or be hunted. When she marries the brooding, reclusive billionaire Sebastian Hawthorn, she isn’t looking for love. She is looking for a fortress.She finds it on Aethelgard Rock, a storm-battered island off the coast of Maine, home to a moss-covered mansion that breathes, groans, and keeps its secrets buried deep in the stone. The locals whisper of a curse that claims every Hawthorn bride. The formidable matriarch, Eleanor, watches Clara with eyes like obsidian. And Sebastian? He is a man haunted by the death of his first wife, Annabel, whose red shoe still sits in his safe—a trophy, or a warning.But the isolation is shattered by the return of Julian, Sebastian’s estranged twin brother. Wild, charismatic, and dangerously unhinged, Julian knows the family’s darkest secrets—and he claims Sebastian is a murderer.As the winter storms seal the island off from the world, Clara finds herself trapped between two brothers locked in a deadly war for their inheritance. But the Hawthorns have made a fatal mistake. They think Clara is the damsel in distress. They don’t realize that she didn’t come to Aethelgard to hide.She came to win.