The Taste by Ruby Bloom

Trigger warnings: this book is a dark romance trope with minor references to knife play (no blood), self harm, kidnapping, terminal illness, dubious consent, profanity, violence, death. It does have a HEA.*

SILENT ASSASSIN.
A WIDE-EYED CAFE OWNER.
CAN THEIR PASSION MASK THE BITTER TASTE OF DEATH?

They called him Phantom. Because he was exactly that. Not a man, a ghost of the darkness. Unable to speak. Trained to kill. Conditioned not to feel. To laugh. To love. People screamed his name in fear.
Until a local business owner awakens something human within him.
New to town, Sophie has set up an ice cream parlor, and is struggling under the weight of trying to think with a commercial head on her shoulders. She’s used to seeing the best in the world around her, but her sunny attitude isn’t enough for running a successful business, she needs to be more cut-throat. She sees him watching her from across the street as she serves up huge scoops of silky, vegan ice cream, his eyes hungry. Why won’t he come over and have a taste?
He knows he can never have her, he doesn’t trust himself. He could never hold her, feel her fragile pulse fluttering against his violent hands. Yet it doesn’t stop him from wanting her, wanting to hear her scream his name, not in pain, not in fear, not because death was coming. But in pleasure. Wanting to hear her whispering his name as he fulfills her fantasies.
She has never been able to resist temptation. Because truthfully, even though she finds out he is a member of the notorious Black Coyotes Motorcycle Club, and does not speak, she still wants a taste of him too.
But his past is a graveyard of poisonous secrets. Before he was rescued by the MC, he was a slave in a nefarious Mexican drug cartel. And when one of those secrets from that dark past is reincarnated, will Sophie run back to the land of the living? Can she find the sunshine and sweetness within herself to forgive? Can she move forward without bitterness or has she spent too long with a ghost and become dead inside too?