
Isabella Valencia pours drinks at the ultra-private Valhalla Club by night and pours her soul into a stuck-in-the-middle manuscript by day. Kai Young lives by iron rules: precisely timed nights out, Hemingway cocktails, and corporate control. When Kai shows up off-schedule and orders a glow-in-the-dark nod to Isabella’s accidental condom banter, something clicks. A Latin-quoting CEO-in-waiting shouldn’t get pulled off course by a bartender who laughs like trouble—but he does.
Their spark is immediate and impossible to file away: a shared piano discovery that turns rivalry into longing; a blackout in a restaurant hallway where instincts strip away distance; a secret library and a forbidden kiss that becomes a line they can’t uncross. Then comes a tabloid blast that pulls their private world into public view, the threat of a lost career—and the truth about who Isabella really is.
Between raves and ruses, boardrooms and back rooms, Turks and Caicos and Brooklyn Bridge midnights, Isabella and Kai learn that love asks for what control fears: risk, vulnerability, and a future that refuses to fit neat lines. King of Pride is a swoony, high-heat, high-stakes romance about choosing each other when the world is watching.