Zero Trust

Verify everything. Trust nothing. Then try falling in love.

Iris Kelleher has run security at Halbrook Pay for three years, which mostly means being the last person in the building and the only one who reads the logs twice. She is very good at it. She is also completely alone in it, and has arranged her life so that nobody has to notice.

Jo Ridley breaks into buildings for a living. She is quick, she is funny, and she has been hired for eleven days to find every soft edge Halbrook has. On day two she walks in behind a man carrying a pot plant.

The trouble is that somebody else got in first. Months ago. And they never left.

Forced into the same war room with a live intrusion and a regulator's clock running, Iris and Jo do the work the only way it can be done: together, badly slept, at three in the morning, one honest sentence at a time. Neither of them is looking for this. Both of them are extremely bad at admitting it.

Then somebody hands Iris a file that reconciles perfectly. Every artefact where it should be. Nothing missing. Nothing that needs explaining.

Nothing in this case has ever been tidy.

Thirteen years between them, and neither of them will say so out loud. A war room, a night shift, a great deal of bad tea, and one conversation at three in the morning that neither of them was supposed to have.

For readers who like:

• Slow-burn sapphic romance where the burn is genuinely slow
• An age gap that nobody in the book is willing to mention
• Workplace forced proximity, with nowhere to go and no shift that ends
• Competence as a love language, and two women who are very good at their jobs
• Romantic suspense where nobody runs anywhere, and the tension is whether the work is good enough

Slow-burn sapphic romantic suspense, set in the City of London. No cheating, no third-act misunderstanding, no cliffhanger. Happy ever after, and it costs somebody something.