Not All Love Stories Have Happy Endings: Inside Love or Loyalty—Betrayal, Wounds, And Consequences

Updated Post. Originally published October 2025

Last year, as I was getting into Destined to Love Her, I found myself in a bit of a pickle. I was putting too much attention on the backstory between Tele, Raph, and Helena—the Greek Goddess who stole and then broke Raph’s heart.

I was framing the events as part of Tele’s ongoing story, weaving in Helena’s sudden death, and also trying to show Tele and Raph’s reconciliation. It simply wasn’t working. It was too complex to be a subplot, and more than that, it was making Raph a main character when, indeed, it was Tele’s turn to be in the spotlight. Consequently, Tele and Safi’s blossoming romance was getting completely lost in the shadows.

Still, that backstory needed to be told for two reasons:

First, I  wanted you, my readers, to meet the woman Tele had loved and lost by the time we meet him as a widower and single dad in Destined to Love Her. But most importantly, I thought you should know what he had been willing to sacrifice for love before he meets Safi, the Megiri supermodel who gives his heart a new place to call home.

Second, I wanted you to have a better understanding of Raph’s core wound when you first met him in Seduced by Passion.

And so, Love or Loyalty, the Billionaire Island Brides series prequel was born.

Love or Loyalty, which takes place eight years before SBP, does not have the happy ending you’re accustomed to getting from me.

In this prequel, Raph is twenty-five years old, CEO of G3, but not yet a billionaire. He is visiting his grandfather in Santorini, and one night, while at a house party, Helena Christou walks onto the balcony. His world stops, and for the first time in his very controlled and ordered life, Rapheus Giannopoulos doesn’t know what to do with himself. Though, by the end of the night, he knows he’s madly in love.

But soon the ground beneath them begins to shift, and things change in ways neither of them saw coming, setting off a chain of events that tests the unshakable bond of three brothers who once believed that nothing could ever come between them.

Much greater than the betrayal that involved Helena, I believe the true cost was losing who they each were before it happened. And as a result, Raph didn’t just close the door to his heart. He sealed it inside a vault. The man who walked away from that betrayal was harder, colder—the remnants of someone who had loved deeply, was broken thoroughly, and decided that the only safe love was no love at all. That is until Xiomara Davenport tore down every wall he’d built…

I’ll be honest with you—writing this story was one of the hardest things I’ve done. I needed you to feel for every character without losing sight of what their choices cost each other. Nobody is a villain here. They are just people undone by the kind of love that doesn’t wait for permission to bloom. And no one walks away without having paid a price…

You can read the first chapter of Love or Loyalty on my Blog. Purchase it directly from Ana’s Shop. Or buy it from the Retailer of your choice.