Closer Than Skin

Then Malek Rios looks at Isla like he already knows where she keeps the hurt.

Isla is good at distance—good at leaving first, before anyone can leave her. Touch has never been tenderness; it’s been survival, traded for a few seconds of quiet. Malek is different in the most dangerous way: he doesn’t push, doesn’t take, doesn’t demand. He watches. He listens. He waits. And when Isla finally lets him close, he touches only what she offers—patient enough to make her body believe in safety again.

But chemistry is easy. Intimacy is war.

Because Malek carries his own history—an old life he ran from, a past that taught him to brace for abandonment. And Isla can’t stop flinching at the very thing she wants most: someone who stays. As desire turns into something deeper, her instincts fight back—silence, escape, the urge to ruin it before it becomes real.

Malek wants honesty. Isla wants control. And both of them want a love that doesn’t just feel good… it changes them.

A scorching, emotionally intense contemporary romance about consent, scars, and the terrifying choice to let someone get closer than skin.