Risk of Desire

Risk of Desire is a steamy billionaire, enemies-to-lovers Spanish romance featuring an ice-cold casino king who never gambles, a fierce British heroine who refuses to sell, an undercover billionaire deception, a hostile bidding war, forced proximity in a crumbling eighteenth-century hotel above Ronda's gorge, old-world Andalusian glamour, a devastating secret locked in a drawer, scorching slow-burn chemistry, and a guaranteed HEA.

He spent a week in my hotel pretending to be nobody.

I made him coffee before dawn.
I told him about the man who left me this place.
I let him help me bail out a flooded room at two in the morning.

Then, at checkout, the quiet Spanish guest laid a business card on my reception desk and offered — in one composed sentence — to buy my world.

Mateo de la Vega. Casino billionaire. The eldest Vega brother, and the coldest. A man who has never once placed a bet he couldn't cover.

Every kindness of that week reclassified itself as an audit.

I called him a vulture in a good suit.
He remembers every word.

The Hotel Montemayor has hung over the edge of Ronda's gorge for two hundred years. Enrique left it to me — the debts, the shuttered east wing, the forty people who clock in every morning, the wedding every family in this town has had here. It's the only Spain I have left.

And it's dying.

So when the numbers finally beat me, I do the one thing I swore I never would. I open the doors to offers.

One historic hotel. Two bidders. One winter deadline.

Mateo comes back — as himself this time — against a charming developer who promises to preserve everything and intends to strip it to the stone.

I tell myself I'm only using one predator to fight the other — and that I'm the one setting the price.

Then we start defending this house side by side, and the most controlled man in Europe begins to slip. The more I refuse him, the closer he comes. The more he lets me see beneath all that ruthless discipline, the harder it is to remember he came here to own me.

I don't know about the drawer.

I don't know that while he's building a future with me, he's quietly holding another one in reserve — and that his rival is waiting for the worst possible moment to open it.

Because Mateo de la Vega came here to acquire my hotel.

He didn't expect me to raise the stakes.

And the worst part?

Neither did I.