A steamy billionaire instalove romance featuring a watchful cybersecurity CEO who crossed a crowded rooftop to stand in her corner, a guarded paralegal who built her whole life around staying invisible, and the devastating discovery that the silence she’d been protecting was just loneliness wearing a better name.
She went to the party to survive twenty minutes. She stayed because of him.
I went to the party because my supervisor said it would be good for visibility, which sounds reasonable until you’re standing on a rooftop in work clothes surrounded by people holding wine you don’t drink, counting down from twenty minutes in your head.I found the spot behind the planters before I’d been there five minutes.Back to the wall. Sightlines to every entrance.Invisible from three directions. I put my earbuds around my neck like a compromise and told myself I was being social.
Then he walked straight to me. Not in my direction. To me.
Sebastian Voss built his cybersecurity company from the ground up and spent the last eighteen months watching a former co-founder take credit for everything while the litigation smoldered.He told me that later. What he told me first was his name, and then he stayed—not making small talk, not working the room, just standing in the one defensible corner of the roof like he’d earned the right to be there.I told him the truth without calculating what it would get me.He looked at me like that was the most surprising thing that had happened to him in a year and a half.
I planned to stay twenty minutes. I stayed forty-five. He noticed.
He came back. To my building. My coffee shop.My floor—five floors in the wrong direction, excuse after excuse, each one thinner than the last. I called him on every one.I said yes anyway. Because the man who crossed a rooftop to stand in my corner wasn’t performing interest—he was just present, the way two people who learned to watch everything recognize each other on sight.
He had walls. I understood walls. Mine were built from a childhood that went from still to chaos overnight and nine years of teaching myself that control was the only safe place to live.His were built from betrayal. We didn’t talk about any of that for a while.We didn’t have to. We just stood in quiet corners together until the walls started feeling less necessary.
Then he showed me the house. Two empty rooms with children’s murals on the walls—the future he wanted, waiting for someone to want it with him. I felt the panic move through me and what was underneath it, both at once. I didn’t leave. I put my hands on his chest and stayed.
I don’t do anything accidentally. Including that.
Her Smoldering Billionaire is Book 2 in the Tycoons of Pleasure Valley series. It can be read as a standalone but is best enjoyed in order. This is a steamy open-door romance with explicit on-page scenes, first-time chemistry, and a guaranteed happily ever after.
