Lacey Chase knows love is a curse...it's the reason she has sacrificed everything to stand by her father while he devotes all of his time and attention to finding her mother, who abandoned them years ago. After the search relocates them to a small, isolated community in Virginia, she finds herself in an unfamiliar world-but not completely alone as she believed. It's hate at first sight when she meets her cocky new neighbor, who refuses to take no for an answer...a response that becomes harder to give when Zane awakens a part of her she never knew existed. Zane Nikolas knows something about curses...punished because of his ancestry, his very existence depends upon the consumption of human blood, an act which provides the only pleasure he is capable of experiencing. After discovering a single female residing nearby, he decides to add her to the group of women he regularly feeds upon-but finds her unreceptive to his advances. It's an unwelcome challenge that becomes a driving obsession when he realizes that Lacey alone is the gateway to a forbidden world...one filled with everything he's been denied.