The Witch of St. Augustine: Forbidden Colonial Desire and Possessive Command

St. Augustine, 1672. The air sits thick and still, and the smell of salt and woodsmoke never quite leaves the streets.

Isabel de la Cruz knows herbs. She knows how to read certain signs in the world around her. In a colonial settlement built on suspicion and strict faith, that's enough to get a woman accused of witchcraft.

Captain Alejandro Vargas is the man assigned to deal with her. He's known for order, for an unflinching sense of duty, for not bending. Isabel expects a fast judgment and worse consequences.

What she gets instead is confinement in a guarded house, with Alejandro watching her himself.

His interrogations start exactly the way she expects: controlled, methodical, cold. But Isabel doesn't perform guilt she doesn't feel, and her refusal to shrink under his questioning does something to him he wasn't prepared for. Suspicion starts pulling in another direction entirely.

He's a man who's built his life around his vows. She's a woman with secrets she'd rather die than hand over. The space between them, measured in candlelight and careful silences, keeps getting harder to maintain.

What they're moving toward isn't permitted. By the church, by his rank, by every structure that holds this colony together. And the deeper it goes, the higher the cost of being discovered.

Can either of them survive what they've already started, or has the price of this been set from the beginning?

***

Discover more dangerous love stories in the Claimed Across America series, where every city hides a man who takes and a woman who cannot escape him.

Early America wasn't built on kindness. It ran on nerve, ambition, and the willingness to take what you wanted.

These stories live in that friction. Candlelit rooms where deals get made in low voices. Frontier towns where the law is whoever's holding the gun. In each one, there's a man who's used to getting his way and a woman who isn't interested in making that easy for him.

What follows isn't gentle. Reputation, survival, sin - these are the stakes, and every couple here is tangled up in at least one. Control tips into obsession. Resistance wears down, or doesn't, and either way the tension doesn't break clean.

Each novel works on its own. You don't need the others to follow the story or feel the pull. But read together, they build into something larger: a rougher, more complicated portrait of desire set against a nation still figuring out its own rules.

Because in a world where social codes were ironclad and ambition had no ceiling, wanting someone you shouldn't want wasn't just complicated. It was dangerous. And the line between claiming something and being claimed yourself had a way of blurring when you least expected it.

Seven couples. Seven collisions of will, want, and consequence.

Love, in these pages, doesn't ask permission.

© 2026 Velvet Ink Press (E-bog): 6610001196790

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E-bog: 3. april 2026