How much of a life is chosen—and how much is inherited?
Penelope has always known what her future holds. Raised in the deeply religious vineyards of Grand Valley, she has been taught that a good life is one of duty, restraint, and obedience. Marriage will come. Children will follow. Desire is something to master, not something to follow.
Then she is sent across the island to West Elm, the licentious capital of Bethelbrier, to find a husband among the royal family.
Nothing there resembles the world she knows.
In West Elm, pleasure carries little shame, silk barely conceals skin, and the boundaries Penelope once considered sacred seem made to be crossed. At first she is scandalized. Then curious. And as curiosity becomes something harder to deny, she begins to wonder how much of the woman she expected to become was ever truly her choice.
Prince Corin should represent everything she fears. A warrior, libertine, and heir to the throne, he has spent his life indulging appetites Penelope was taught to suppress. But beneath his certainty lies a question remarkably similar to her own. Corin has inherited a future too—and he is beginning to realize he may not want it.
Around them, others are asking the same dangerous question.
A reluctant prince struggles beneath the expectations of his family. In the North, generations of resentment threaten to erupt into rebellion. Across Bethelbrier, old loyalties, traditions, and obligations are beginning to fracture as people reckon with lives shaped by choices made long before they were born.
Penelope came to West Elm expecting to fulfill her destiny.
Instead, she discovers the terrifying freedom of desire.
But wanting another life is one thing.
Choosing it may change a kingdom.
Desire or Destiny is a lush, provocative fantasy about inheritance and freedom, repression and pleasure, political unrest and dangerous intimacy—and the choices we make when the life we desire is not the one we were given.
“Perhaps this was what her mother had feared all along: not that West Elm would corrupt her, but that it would discover what was already there.”
