I never planned on moving into my professor's billionaire family's guesthouse. I definitely never planned on falling for the coldest man I've ever met.
When my scholarship funding collapses three weeks before finals, I'm one missed payment from losing my apartment — and my shot at graduating at all. The only lifeline is a live-in research fellowship at Kade Innovations, working directly under the company's reclusive acting CEO while I finish my thesis. Free housing. A stipend that could save me. All I have to do is survive one semester under the same roof as Sawyer Kade.
He's exactly what the business magazines say: precise, unreadable, allergic to small talk. What they don't mention is the way his jaw tightens when I laugh too loud in his kitchen. The way he shows up at 2 a.m. with black coffee and doesn't leave. The way he looks at me like I'm a problem he can't solve and doesn't want to.
I tell myself it's proximity. Convenience. Two people orbiting the same too-quiet house.
But Sawyer is holding his family's company together with nothing but spreadsheets and willpower, and one scandal — one photo of him with the wrong woman — could hand it to the board members circling like sharks. I'm not supposed to be a variable in his calculations. I'm definitely not supposed to be the reason he starts breaking his own rules.
Then the past I ran from shows up wearing a Kade Innovations badge, and I realize the fellowship that saved me might be the exact thing that destroys us both.
Some men chase. Sawyer Kade waits — until he doesn't. And once he stops waiting, there's no version of this story where I walk away unchanged.