I was never supposed to be the one standing at his door.

The contract was my sister's — the marriage her fiancé's family drew up to save both our estates, the arrangement that was supposed to make her Mrs. Caius Ashworth by spring. Then she vanished three weeks before the wedding, and left me holding a signature that isn't legally mine to give.

But debt doesn't care whose name is on it. And Caius Ashworth doesn't care that I'm not her.

He looks at me like I've already agreed to something I haven't said yes to yet. Like the terms were always going to end up being his. He doesn't ask what I want. He tells me what he'll give me if I stop pretending I don't want it too — and God help me, he's right.

Caius doesn't do soft. He does control — precise, patient, absolute — and somewhere between his ultimatums and his hands, I stop fighting the parts of myself that answer to him. He calls it an arrangement. I call it drowning. Either way, I can't stop reaching for more.

The problem isn't the club-quiet rooms where he unmakes me, or the ring he says means nothing and touches like it means everything. The problem is the truth he doesn't know: I'm the reason my sister ran. And when he finds out, the man who has spent three months claiming every inch of me is going to want the one thing I can't give back — the truth, before it's too late for both of us.

Tropes: Forbidden Romance · Marriage of Convenience · Dominant Alpha Hero · Power Exchange / Light BDSM · Slow Burn · Family Secret