The cologne found her first.
Bergamot and sandalwood, expensive and deliberate.
Her body remembered before her mind could stop it. A traitor's warmth, a ghost of something that had once felt like desire—before she learned what lived beneath the surface.
She knew that scent. She had worked very hard to forget it...
When curator Emma Wilson encounters a man from her past at a museum gala, he brings more than unwanted memories. He brings a document suggesting a Renaissance masterpiece vanished during World War II—hidden deliberately, waiting to be found.
Now Emma must navigate archival secrets, wartime concealment, and a predator who believes money entitles him to anything he wants, including her... again.
But she was no longer the Emma he thought he knew.
Some paintings are worth more than fortunes. Some secrets outlast the men who buried them.
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Priya Patel had spent seven years learning to read the language of normal.
This morning, normal was lying.
When a subtle anomaly slips past the NSA’s most advanced detection system, Priya sees what no one else can—a presence that knows how to hide by behaving perfectly. As her pursuit deepens, the system goes silent, the evidence vanishes, and the intruder leaves her a message meant for her alone.
Now Priya must confront a truth more dangerous than any breach:
some threats don’t break the system—
they learn it.
And once you’ve been seen, you’re never invisible again.
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These scenes were written during early drafts of the Echoes of Fortune world.
They didn’t advance the plot.
They didn’t raise the stakes.
They never left my thoughts.
They reveal something essential about Jack, Emma, and Steve:
what it costs to chase history, and what lingers after the danger passes.
I chose restraint in the final novel.
These moments remain as an author’s cut.
The Challenge
A reader emailed to ask whether an intense moment from a book could be rewritten as a comedy.
And do so without changing the situation, only the tone.
This scene is the result.
Nothing here is canon. Nothing alters the story.
It’s simply a craft exercise: the same characters, the same stakes, rewritten under a different constraint.