Always Mine: A Second Chance Romance (Wade Legacy Series) by N.W. Brown

If the trope "secret baby" makes you roll your eyes, stay here for a minute. This isn't a story where the hero finds out and immediately forgives her because she had good reasons, and the baby is cute, and love conquers all. And let's set aside the fact that the child is five. Can we even call him a baby? Raschad Carter finds out he has a five-year-old son, and he is angry. He spent his entire life making sure he would never be the man his father was. Then he met Simone, fell in love, and without giving him a choice, she made him his father anyway. He doesn't forgive her easily. What he does do is show up. Raschad is not the kind of man who runs from hard things, so he uproots his life to make sure he never misses another day of his son's existence. He is also not confused about his feelings. He knows he loves Simone. Never stopped. But she hurt him to his core. Twice. And that sits in his chest, rocking back and forth between grief and fury. Simone Wade is a woman shaped by grief and abandonment who has spent years living with a secret she never meant to keep. But fear has a way of turning days into years, and "when the time is right" into never. Simone has spent every day carrying the weight of a choice she can't undo, her silence calcified into years before she understood the cage she'd built for herself. Read more