My Dark Desire (dark Prince Road, #2)

The novel opens with a prologue set when Zachary Sun is 12 years old. Riding in a Bentley with his father, Bo Sun, a wealthy art collector, Zach watches as a truck slams into their car during a rainstorm. Bo shields Zach with his body, and a landscape rake pierces through Bo's torso. Trapped upside down beneath his father's body for hours while rescuers dismantle the wreckage, Zach is left with a severe aversion to human touch, a phobia of rain, and deep emotional numbness. Bo mouths final words Zach cannot hear over the ringing in his ears, a mystery that haunts him for decades.

Twenty-one years later, Farrow Ballantine, a 22-year-old competitive fencer still training toward Olympic qualification, sneaks into Zach's Potomac estate during a party his mother has organized to help him select a bride. Her goal is to steal back a jade pendant that belonged to her late father, which her stepmother, Vera, auctioned off after his death and which Zach purchased. Since her father's passing, Farrow has been treated as the family maid by Vera and her stepsisters, Tabitha and Reggie, despite living in her own childhood home.

Farrow locates the pendant in Zach's office inside a glass case alongside an identical pendant, the pair a his-and-hers set from China's Song Dynasty. As she begins cutting the glass, Zach catches her. Intrigued by her knowledge of Go, an ancient strategy board game, he forces her to play. They spend nearly three hours in intellectual combat before Farrow bolts, scaling his iron gate and disappearing, leaving behind one sneaker.

Zach traces the shoe to the Ballantine household and pressures Vera into revealing Farrow's existence. He proposes a deal: Farrow will work as his exclusive housekeeper for six months as punishment for the attempted theft, and in exchange, he will fund a legal team to help her contest her father's will, which she believes Vera fabricated. Farrow agrees, unaware of Zach's deeper motive: He has realized she is the only person whose touch does not make him physically ill and intends to use her proximity to cure his aversion so he can marry someone else and give his mother the life he feels he owes her.

It also emerges that Farrow has been Zach's anonymous fencing instructor at a local country club, training him in épée, a form of competitive sword fighting, under the alias Jane Doe. Her coach, Andras Horvath, has been pushing her toward Olympic qualification. When Zach deduces her identity during a lesson, the power dynamic shifts further.

Meanwhile, Zach's mother, Constance, pressures him to marry Eileen Yang, a neurologist and Bo's goddaughter. Eileen presents herself as sharing Zach's aversion to physical intimacy, and they negotiate a clinical marriage arrangement. When Eileen shakes Zach's hand, he suffers a severe reaction, rushing to scald his skin under boiling water. Farrow finds him, tends to his burns without touching his skin, and confirms his realization that she alone can be near him without triggering his condition.

As Farrow settles into the estate, Zach grows possessive. Constance offers Farrow an unspecified sum to quit; Farrow names a price of two million dollars, but when Constance agrees, Farrow declines. At a business dinner, when a guest sexually harasses Farrow, Zach throws a knife into the man's hand. Their tension spills into physical encounters: In the country club sauna, Zach touches Farrow's bare skin for the first time without recoiling. Later, Farrow cups his face in the garden, the first time anyone has touched it since the accident.

Constance announces Zach and Eileen's engagement at a party that falls on Farrow's 23rd birthday, devastating her. Dallas Costa, the pregnant wife of Zach's best friend Romeo Costa, befriends Farrow and provides a crucial emotional lifeline. Zach follows Farrow to her childhood home, admits he acted coldly to maintain the pretense of a strictly transactional relationship, and presents legal documents proving a time discrepancy in her father's will. Overwhelmed, Farrow embraces him, and they share their first kiss.

Vera retaliates by leaking to the media that Farrow once threw a fencing match in Seoul. Farrow reveals the full story: After her father's death, Vera cut off her finances to prevent her from attending the funeral, so Farrow accepted a bribe to lose a match in exchange for a plane ticket home. The scandal ends her Olympic aspirations. During a rainstorm, Zach tells Farrow the full story of his father's death, and they share their first major physical intimacy, marking a breakthrough in his healing. In the Hamptons, Farrow overhears Eileen on the phone bragging about her plan to seduce Zach, contradicting Eileen's earlier claim of shared aversion. Zach and Farrow later consummate their relationship, and their bond deepens even as his engagement to Eileen remains in place.

The legal team uncovers that Vera orchestrated Farrow's father's death, hiring a valet named Eugene Thomas to crash into him deliberately. Vera's motive was financial: Her husband's will left most of his estate to Farrow. The investigation also reveals that Farrow's fencing coach, Andras, is Eugene's father, explaining why Andras pressured Farrow to drop her lawsuit. Farrow confronts Vera and records her confession. When Andras arrives and assaults Farrow, Zach beats him severely while his friends Oliver von Bismarck and Romeo restrain him.

Farrow tells Zach she loves him but asks for 30 days apart to grieve her father, process the revelations, and build an independent life. She circles a date on his calendar and tells him to return if he loves her. Zach gives her a key to his garage without explaining what it opens.

During the separation, Farrow rents a studio, begins coaching fencers, and adopts a puppy named Vezzali. Zach spirals, neglecting everything while trying to end his engagement. He flies to Thailand to confront Constance, who has fled to prevent the wedding's cancellation. After Constance suffers a health scare, they reconcile: Zach holds her hand for the first time in over 20 years, and she agrees to accept Farrow. He then flies to Italy to end the engagement.

On the 30th day, Farrow uses the key and discovers Zach has spent months reacquiring every item Vera sold after her father's death, including the jade pendant, accompanied by a note: "I'm a greedy bastard, Farrow Ballantine. That you're enough for me says it all" (399). Meanwhile, Zach's return flight hits severe turbulence, and as the plane drops, he finally remembers Bo's dying words.

Zach arrives at a fencing arena, disheveled and missing a shoe, and commandeers the microphone to declare his love publicly, confessing his touch aversion and crediting Farrow with teaching him to live. He drops to one knee, holds up her tattered sneaker from the night they met, and proposes. Farrow says yes.

In the epilogue, they marry in a Las Vegas chapel wearing full fencing gear, officiated by an Elvis impersonator. At the altar, Zach whispers his father's last words: "The pendants unite two souls. Fate knows what we don't" (419).