Nine years ago, Alex Strozzi walked away from a man she had loved since the fourth week of a Cambridge seminar. She didn't explain. She didn't call. She built a life around the a fashion house to inherit, an eight-year-old son to raise alone, a job that demanded she be a person who managed everything and needed nothing.
Then her father dies, his will is read, and Maxwell Grant walks back into Bellamare to handle the legal complications.
Max is the lawyer the Strozzi family has trusted for four years without anyone telling Alex who he was. He is also the man who never knew what she carried with her when she disappeared from his life. Now Matteo has his jaw, his eyes, and a question he is too young to know how to ask. Max is good at math.
What follows is the story of two careful people learning to stop being careful with each other. A coastal estate in Maine where every room holds a memory neither of them got to keep. A villa in Florence where Alex's grandfather hid sixty years of secrets in a cedar armoire. A son who needs the truth and a five-year-old daughter who decides Alex is hers. An ex-wife with a custody filing and a journal entry about a Florentine family with a Medici claim.
Set against the worlds of Italian high fashion, private aviation, and the quiet inheritance of grief, Strozzi! is a slow-burn, grumpy + sunshine, second chance, single dad, secret baby billionaire romance about what it costs to need someone. And what it gives back when you finally let yourself.
For readers of Carley Fortune, Kennedy Ryan, and Abby Jimenez,