AL

Cassian Lodge has spent his entire life knowing his future was never his to choose. Growing up in the same elite old-money town, he, Arabella Sutton, and Grayson Cole attended the same schools from kindergarten through high school. Grayson and Arabella were inseparable, finally dating their freshman year, while Cassian was the popular boy every girl wanted but never pursued. There was no point. His parents had always made one thing clear: one day, he would marry the woman they chose for him. He just never knew that woman was Arabella. Despite years of attending school together—and countless family dinners that suddenly began freshman year Cassian and Arabella remained little more than strangers, both sensing the adults around them were hiding something. Then, the summer before senior year, everything changed. Arabella’s father ended her relationship with Grayson with a single conversation, revealing a promise made long before any of them were old enough to object: she had been promised to Cassian. An arranged courtship became an engagement after graduation. Now, a year and a half later of being engaged. Cassian and Arabella return home after their freshman year of college, only weeks away from their summer wedding. Grayson, who chose a college across the country to escape watching the woman he loved marry someone else, is forced home for the summer too. No one expected Cassian to fall hopelessly in love with the fiancée he was only meant to marry out of obligation. He wants to be the man Arabella chooses, not the one chosen for her. But while she’s begun building a life beside Cassian, a part of her still belongs to the first love she never got the chance to keep