My father's company was never mine to save. Bastien Vane made sure of that.
I'm Wren Ashford — twenty-seven, an architect who spent three years trying to keep my father's failing firm alive with nothing but stubbornness and unpaid overtime. Bastien Vane bought the company out from under both of us. He didn't want the blueprints. He wanted the one condition my father never should have agreed to: one year, living under his roof, as his ward in every legal sense and something far less innocent in every other.
He calls it a stewardship arrangement. I call it a gilded leash.
Bastien Vane built an empire out of the ashes of a family that tried to erase him before he was old enough to fight back. He doesn't lose. He doesn't share. And he has never, not once, let anyone close enough to matter — until a canceled contract handed him a woman he wasn't supposed to want to keep.
He watches me like I'm the one variable he can't control. He touches me like it's already decided. And somewhere between his cold rules and the nights he forgets to be cold at all, I stop counting down the months until I'm free.
Bastien doesn't believe in things that can't be taken from him. He learned that lesson the hard way, and he's spent seventeen years making sure nothing gets close enough to cost him again. Wren Ashford was supposed to be a clause in a contract. She was never supposed to become the one thing he'd burn the empire down to protect.
This is a full-length, standalone dark romance with a guaranteed HEA — no cheating, no cliffhanger, explicit heat throughout.
Tropes: Forced Proximity, Billionaire Romance, Possessive Alpha, Dark Romance, Contract Arrangement, Fairytale Retelling
18+ only. Contains explicit sexual content and power-imbalance dynamics between consenting adults.