SHE DESTROYED HIM ONCE. HE’S LEARNED WHICH BATTLES ARE WORTH FIGHTING TWICE.

I never stopped loving her.

Not in college. Not through fifteen hundred hours in the cockpit. Not during deployments to war-torn countries. Not even when I convinced myself I’d moved on. Because Summer Holt was my first everything—my best friend, my home, my future.

And then she broke my heart.

Now, eleven years later, I'm flying F-35s across the desert and suddenly, she's back. She looks exactly like every memory I tried to forget. Still beautiful. Still infuriating. And she isn’t alone.

There’s a little girl with her.

And seeing them, I realize fate might be giving me a second chance…if I’m brave enough to take it.

He was supposed to fly away and never look back. That was the plan—his dream, my heartbreak.

I told myself I did the right thing when I pushed him away, when I built a life far from the boy I once loved.

Then Tyler Carter walks back into my world—older, steadier, still unfairly handsome—and the walls I built start to crack.

But he doesn’t know the truth. He doesn’t know about the little girl waiting at home—one with his smile and my eyes. Telling him means risking everything. The life I built, my relationship with my daughter, and the fragile heart that never stopped belonging to him.