She came to his table expecting threats. He offered her a deal instead.
Lea Rousseau is twenty-three years old, working three jobs, finishing her master’s thesis, and slowly drowning alongside a father whose gambling debts have reached the wrong people. She doesn’t scare easily — fear has been the background hum of her life for so long she’s stopped hearing it.
Damien Kavinsky is the kind of man rooms rearrange themselves around. Billionaire. Calculated. Five years of keeping every relationship transactional, every door locked from the inside.
Then a cocktail waitress spills Scotch on his shirt and offers — with trembling hands and a balance of $300 — to pay for it.
He finds her the next morning. The offer is simple: three months as his public partner, attending galas and board dinners, convincing his investors he’s the kind of man who stays. In exchange, her father’s $152,000 disappears.
She signs.
He rewrites the terms.
Now she’s living in his penthouse, sleeping down the hall from a man who reads her thesis abstracts at 2 AM, who notices when her desk height is wrong, who looks at her like she’s the one variable in his empire he didn’t account for.
Lea knows exactly what this is. She’s too smart not to.
The problem is — so does he.
A slow-burn forbidden contract romance set in Montreal. No cheating. Guaranteed HEA by book five.
