Sugar and Ruin

She needed a way out of impossible math. He needed a reason to want something without a contract attached to it.

Marlowe Reyes has one rule: never need anyone enough that their leaving could break her. Between three jobs, a mountain of grad school debt, and a mother whose medical bills don't care how many hours she works, Marlowe has learned exactly how far competence can stretch before it snaps.

Callum Vance has one rule: nothing enters his life without terms attached to it. At the altar, in front of two hundred and forty guests, he just learned his fiancée was paid to leave him there. Some men would call off the wedding season. Callum calls his lawyer.

When a spilled glass of champagne and a broker's careless introduction put Marlowe in Callum's orbit, what starts as a six-month arrangement - her name, his terms, a very specific set of boundaries neither of them intends to cross - becomes the one contract Callum never bothered to draft an exit clause for.

She was never supposed to be more than a line item.

But when a leaked contract threatens to become the scandal of the season, Callum has to prove he can protect Marlowe without controlling her - and Marlowe has to decide whether being fully known is a risk worth taking, after a lifetime of learning that need is just another kind of debt.

Sugar and Ruin is a slow-burn, possessive-billionaire romance about the difference between being handled and being chosen - the first book in the Empire of Want series, where one Chicago family's fortune keeps colliding with the people who refuse to be bought by it.

• Standalone romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after - no cliffhanger

• Slow burn, class-gap romance, forced proximity, grand gesture

• Book One of the Empire of Want series - every book is a complete, standalone HEA

If you love billionaires who learn to ask instead of decide, heroines who refuse to be handled, and a slow burn that finally catches fire - start with Sugar and Ruin.