Kassia Maynor has built her life around being needed. As a Refugee Health Specialist at the Center for Family Health and Safety, she guides families through medical appointments, government systems, and the frightening work of beginning again. Then she goes home to the eight-year-old niece she has raised since toddlerhood. Kassia gives freely because giving keeps her in control. It keeps her useful. It keeps anyone from seeing how little she expects for herself. Cáng-Lán Duàn becomes a problem the moment he looks beyond her competence and recognizes the woman who has spent years making sure nobody has to carry her.
Cáng-Lán built a construction company from nothing, turning discipline and ambition into the kind of wealth that lets him choose his projects. Renovating the Center should be temporary work. A professional obligation. Kassia changes that with every sharp answer, every refusal to accept help, every glimpse of softness she tries to hide. Their site meetings become the part of his day he anticipates most. He understands the distance in her because he knows what it costs to begin again after displacement. Yet wanting her makes restraint harder than any deal he has ever negotiated. One dinner shifts the ground between them. One kiss leaves him wanting a place in her life that no contract can guarantee.
The project has an end date, and Kassia has spent too long believing that dependence is another word for loss. Cáng-Lán wants more than stolen moments and professional boundaries stretched thin, but he cannot build a future for a woman who refuses to let him near the parts of her that hurt. If Kassia cannot risk trusting him, the renovation will end exactly as planned.
And the man who finally sees her may become another person she teaches herself to live without.
Genre: Romance
Cáng-Lán built a construction company from nothing, turning discipline and ambition into the kind of wealth that lets him choose his projects. Renovating the Center should be temporary work. A professional obligation. Kassia changes that with every sharp answer, every refusal to accept help, every glimpse of softness she tries to hide. Their site meetings become the part of his day he anticipates most. He understands the distance in her because he knows what it costs to begin again after displacement. Yet wanting her makes restraint harder than any deal he has ever negotiated. One dinner shifts the ground between them. One kiss leaves him wanting a place in her life that no contract can guarantee.
The project has an end date, and Kassia has spent too long believing that dependence is another word for loss. Cáng-Lán wants more than stolen moments and professional boundaries stretched thin, but he cannot build a future for a woman who refuses to let him near the parts of her that hurt. If Kassia cannot risk trusting him, the renovation will end exactly as planned.
And the man who finally sees her may become another person she teaches herself to live without.
Genre: Romance