Desire & Protection

A detective with a shattered past.

A silence that hides more than secrets—it conceals the night he’s never spoken of.

Roman Viento is a homicide detective, abruptly pulled from his case and reassigned to New York after a life-threatening confrontation that nearly sent him into a spiral rooted in his childhood. The move feels like protection, until he’s sent back to Chicago, straight into everything he tried to outrun.

What he’s asked to do when he returns changes everything.

A deeper betrayal is waiting. One that pulls him into a web of corruption, where the lines between justice and survival blur beyond recognition.

He slips back into the role he’s mastered—surreptitious, strategic, untouchable. A man who’s spent years turning pain into control and shutting the world out.

Until Aniella Fasquelle.

She’s ambitious, kind, and unprepared for the shadows she’s about to step into. She notices the fractures he swore didn’t exist.

And then there’s Eli, a boy from the shelter, full of questions Roman’s been avoiding.
Both could shatter the control that’s kept him alive. One through love, the other through truth.

Tense, addictive, and quietly explosive, Desire & Protection is a gripping debut about trauma, dangerous desire, and the unraveling of a man who thought he could never be seen—and the cost of letting someone in.

Heather Marsala is a former business manager turned romantic suspense author whose work explores the collision of desire, trauma, and transformation. With a voice marked by restraint and psychological depth, her stories unfold in layered, slow-burn tension. She resides in Massachusetts and writes for readers drawn to haunted characters, moral complexity, and narratives that reward attention. Desire and Protection is her debut novel