Forensic accountant Mara Voss has spent her career finding the lies hidden inside numbers. She never expected to find one big enough to get her killed.

When Mara stumbles across a pattern of falsified shipping manifests buried in a routine audit of Ashford Harbor's largest maritime conglomerate, she assumes it's garden-variety fraud — until her apartment is ransacked, her car is run off the road, and the only man who can keep her alive is the last man on earth she wants watching her back.

Five years ago, federal investigator Sawyer Kade's biggest case collapsed because of a legal loophole Mara's old firm handed the opposing counsel. He lost his career over it. She's spent five years telling herself she has nothing to apologize for. Now he's the private security contractor her company has hired to protect her, and neither one of them is happy about it.

But the closer Sawyer looks at the threats against Mara, the clearer it becomes: this isn't fraud. It's a laundering pipeline funding something far more dangerous, run by a man with the money and the reach to make problems disappear — and Mara has just become a very expensive problem. Forced into close quarters with the one man who has every reason to resent her, Mara finds that survival means trusting him completely, even as the danger closing in forces both of them to confront exactly what they lost the last time they let each other down.

With a killer counting the days until she stops being useful and starts being a liability, Mara and Sawyer have one chance to expose the truth before midnight runs out on both of them — and on the fragile, furious, undeniable pull neither one can outrun.

Fast-paced, twisty, and simmering with unresolved tension, this edge-of-your-seat standalone romantic suspense delivers a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance, a forced-proximity protection detail, and a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top.

Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Bodyguard Romance, Woman in Danger, Slow Burn, Corporate Conspiracy Suspense