nicole denise johansson

~BOOK ONE OF THE LOVE SERIES. Love’s darkest spark. ❧ Dedication: To my darlings who wants to be owned and dominated, here is a perfect chance to get on your fucking knees. ❧ Love didn’t save them, hate did. Nicole Daniels never imagined her world would fall apart so violently. Betrayed by her husband, backstabbed by her best friend, and left grieving a child she never got to hold. She's done pretending to be okay. When Rhett Otis, her ex-husband’s cold and infuriating stepbrother, offers her a contract marriage with an offer she can’t refuse, she accepts without hesitation. It’s not love, It’s not hope. It’s survival and revenge or so she told herself. Yet she didn’t fall for him. She crashed, burned, and never recovered. While Rhett told her they were just business but he kissed her like she was his. He was supposed to stay away from her but he married her instead. She was forbidden, but he craved her destruction— hated her for slipping under his skin and hated himself even more for needing her to stay there. What began as a business arrangement becomes a brutal tangle of secrets, yearning, and something neither of them dare name. Enemies. Pretenders. Liars. That’s all they were ever meant to be. But sometimes, pretend hate burns too hot and love becomes the darkest spark.

Nicole Evans never asked to be followed. She never asked for eyes in the dark, for a man like Vane to orbit her life with silence and devotion sharp enough to wound. But obsession doesn’t ask permission. It waits. It watches. It becomes inevitable. What began with missing men and shadows on rooftops soon unraveled into something far more intimate—an assassin who couldn’t let go, and a woman who, piece by piece, stopped trying to make him. As friends vanished and her world narrowed, Nicole found herself drawn toward the very thing she feared most—not out of love, but recognition. In his violence, there was something terrifyingly tender. In his silence, something that listened more closely than anyone else ever had. Theirs is not a love story in any ordinary sense. It’s a descent—a long, slow collapse into dependency, into surrender. A story told in bruises and shared tea, in blood and in stillness. A quiet unraveling that doesn’t end in escape, but in a house by the sea, where memory lingers and echoes never fade. Some stories don’t ask to be understood. Only remembered.