She was his nineteen-year-old responsibility. He was her mother's husband. And in the suffocating silence of a lonely lake house, he was about to become her most dangerous secret. Following her mother's sudden death, Chloe is shuttled off to a remote lake house in the Michigan woods. With no money and nowhere else to go, she is now the ward of Elias, the intense and reclusive sculptor her mother married three years ago. He's a stranger to her, a man of quiet, unnerving intensity. But in the suffocating heat of summer, the lines between guardian and ward begin to blur, threatening to ignite a scandalous fire that could consume them both. She didn't want to need him, didn't want to feel the surprising pull of his silent strength. But when Elias offers to teach her his craft, she discovers a world of raw passion and control that is both terrifying and hypnotic. And when a hidden journal reveals her mother's own obsession with the broken man she married, Chloe is forced to question everything she thought she knew. Is this twisted legacy of grief and desire her inheritance? He wants to shape her, possess her, and break her. But in a summer built on lies , some secrets are sharp enough to shatter them both. Will Chloe surrender to a passion that could heal her or destroy her forever? One click is all it takes to spend a summer at the lake.