I left the office at ten past ten on a Friday in October. I never made it home.

My name is Eden Locke. I am twenty years old, a marketing intern at Crowe Capital, a girl from a small town in Indiana who came to Manhattan with nothing but a navy blazer and a list of careful plans.

His name is Damon Crowe. He is fifty-five. He has been divorced four times and is worth more money than my hometown will see in a generation. He shook my hand in his office on a Wednesday in September and he held it eight seconds too long.

On Friday the second of October, at fourteen minutes past ten, on a sidewalk in Murray Hill, I disappeared.

I woke up in his bed.

Nine months later I am writing this from the house he built around me, in the mountains where no one will find me, where his housekeeper irons the napkins and his security chief brings me back when I run. I am about to have his son.

I am also, for reasons I cannot explain to anyone, including myself, beginning to wonder whether I want to leave.

He took me because an old woman in a shop off Bleecker Street told him to. I am still trying to decide whether she was real.

The body knows things the mind has not caught up to yet.

I was the woman who stayed.

His Claimed Intern is a full-length standalone dark romance. It pairs a twenty-year-old woman with a man thirty-five years her senior who takes her off a Manhattan sidewalk and builds a life around her in a place she cannot leave. Pregnancy sits at the center of the story, and the happily ever after arrives on her terms. Readers should know the book contains kidnapping, prolonged confinement, dubious consent, surveillance, explicit sexual content, and detailed pregnancy and birth scenes; it is written for adults who know what they are choosing. There is no cheating and no cliffhanger. It belongs to the Forbidden Desires series, where every book stands alone and can be read in any order.