An analyst with a debt. A boss with a contract. A fake romance the whole internet is watching.
She built her whole life so no one could ever repossess it. Then the internet caught her boss two inches from kissing her in the boardroom—and decided the argument was foreplay.
Chloe Vance speaks fluent balance sheet and trusts numbers more than people—because numbers never left a FOR LEASE sign hanging in her family's window. At Apex Capital she is one promotion from safe and one bad night from ruin, and she has priced every risk in her life down to the decimal.
Julian Sterling is the managing partner who portions his almonds, hands out approval like a controlled substance, and is the only man alive who can match her formula for formula. She would rather audit tax returns for a decade than admit she thinks about him after hours.
Then a single accidental livestream turns their private, razor-edged argument into the internet's favorite toxic workplace romance—forty thousand views and climbing—and hands corporate raider Richard Vance—her own uncle, the man who already repossessed her childhood once—exactly the opening he needs to swallow the firm whole.
The only way to save Apex is to make the lie official: sign a contract, sell the relationship, and give the cameras a love story instead of a scandal. Fake terms. Real cameras. A ticking clock on a takeover neither of them can afford to lose.
But the better they perform the romance, the harder it is to remember it was ever a performance—and the man trying to dismantle the firm knows precisely which of them to break first.
A high-heat, open-door contemporary romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. Standalone with an interconnected series arc.
Content Note: Explicit sexual content (18+), workplace power dynamics, corporate blackmail and a smear / leak, brief references to family financial ruin.
