Before He Became My Obsessed Billionaire

*"Did you ever love me?"* I asked him once. He said nothing. Just looked at me with those cold gray eyes, controlling my every breath. *"I love you,"* he mouthed three years later—drowning, bleeding, smiling—as he shoved me toward the rescue boat and sank like a stone. --- For two years, Summer Hayes believed her billionaire husband married her as revenge. Cold touches. Suffocating control. Silent punishment for the girl who'd never noticed him in high school. Then Kieran Cross died saving her life, and she learned the truth: he'd loved her all along. He just never knew how to show it. Three years of PTSD. Three years of therapy she couldn't finish, nightmares she couldn't escape, his bloodied face haunting every sleepless night. The day she finally confessed everything to her therapist, she drove home blinded by tears—straight into a semi-truck. *If I get another chance... I swear I'll see you. I'll know you. I won't let you die alone.* She woke up at sixteen. Her mother is alive. Kieran just transferred to her school—a scholarship kid in a threadbare hoodie, starving himself to afford his little sister's hearing aids, invisible to everyone. When no one would sit beside him, Summer pulled out the chair. *My dead husband, this lifetime—live well.* *But what happens when saving him... means falling for him all over again?*