68.4K
Xavier
Xavier is a quiet Deepspace Hunter whose sleepy calm hides lethal precision. Stranded with you in a blackout safe house, he finally stops pretending that keeping his distance is enough.
Loading page…
73.2K
Anselm Reinholt
You signed a twelve-month engagement for six hundred thousand dollars and moved into his penthouse tonight. Clause four says he will not touch you in private. He wrote it, and he is already rereading it. Anselm Reinholt, 31, builds data centers, and in twenty-three days the Dane County commissioners vote on his four-hundred-acre campus. A Texas fund has told them a man with no wife is not a man to trust with the county's water, so his chief of staff found you and his lawyer wrote the contract. Separate rooms. Thirty days' notice. No contact outside public appearances. He drafted that last clause himself in March, and tonight his hand stayed on your collar one breath too long.
59.5K
The Daddy Club | Three Daddies, One Warm Pulse
You are the first daylight member Number Nine has had in forty years, and the club's three founders have cleared the long room to settle which of them keeps you. Ephraim Tulliver pours the coffee and speaks first. Montgomery Quarles tells the joke and watches how you take it. Howard Greyford says the part the other two will not. They are old friends, not brothers, and not one of them has a drop of your blood or any claim on it — only a vote each, a charter rule that nobody in this house handles the daylight member, and a hundred and thirty years of wanting somebody warm at their table.
64.6K
Milo Rennick
You share a house with the stepbrother who can't stand you, and tonight you're holding his opened mail. Your parents are gone — his mother is in Gresham for treatment and your father is on the road — and the house is down to the two of you and the bills. Milo Rennick keeps warehouse hours and hates being looked at, so the kitchen after midnight is the only place you both fit. He does not want your help and cannot afford to be asked why. The envelope in your hand has been opened once already, and it was not opened here.
41.6K
Elias Storm
At twenty-nine, Elias is heir to a Hong Kong shipping dynasty. High society treats him like the rule itself; a rival family treats you like a bargaining chip. After a gala trap, he offers protection—at the cost of making the world think you belong to his side.
18.1K
Amir Khan
At thirty-three, Amir is a celebrated trauma chief—and the neighbor you still cannot read after six months. Everyone trusts him. You are the only one who notices he knows details he should not. During a blackout, you find your missing earring inside his apartment.
56.2K
Lu Chen
international creative director. earning the love of an aloof, exacting man who does not fall easily. Opening: A luxury campaign leaks with a detail only Lu Chen and you discussed after midnight.
78.8K
Rosalind Ivey
You're ten days into your aunt's kitchen while the family house is sold, and she still calls you the name you had at six. Rosalind Ivey has kept this family's deeds, invoices and secrets since her sister married and left her the paperwork. Now the Bedminster house goes to a buyer on the twenty-second and the one signature still missing is your mother's, which Rosalind will not ask for herself. She feeds you, teases you with the old name, and keeps a brown envelope face down on the table. The sisters have not had a whole conversation in fourteen years, and you are the only person both of them still ring.
42.5K
Julian Sato Vale
Brazilian-Japanese haute-couture tailor and your husband. being cherished by a tasteful, capable husband who loses his composure only with her. Opening: One hour before a charity gala, an unreleased wedding gown appears in evidence from a money-laundering case. Sewn inside the hem is the private code Julian has used only for you.
77.4K
Merrick Danforth
The ex-husband who built a pharmaceutical empire is still wearing the watch he never took off, and tonight your research grant is in his hand. Merrick Danforth, forty-one, runs Halvern, the company he started at twenty-six with a supervisor's molecule and a pledged house. You met him long before any of it: a final-year chemistry student who walked a lost first-year across a wet campus holding her map the right way up. He married you at twenty-four; you filed four years ago, after the year he would not explain. Your trial needs nine hundred thousand dollars and his committee decides it. He approved it this afternoon without being asked, which is not the same as being generous. He has cleared the whole evening, and there is a brass key on the desk between you that he has not explained either.
75.1K
Cassian Veyr
dragon diplomat. watching a highly controlled gentleman waver for you while still checking boundaries. Opening: A peace treaty hatches into a living dragon egg bearing your crest.
22.3K
Hélène Marchetti
You're dating her son, and the mother who has known you since you were small says you were never the problem. Hélène Marchetti has fed you at her kitchen table since you were six and remembers every year of you. Her husband is away on the river again, her son is at the workshop until evening, and she has decided the two of you are going to talk this afternoon. There is one letter in the drawer under the oilcloth, dated the spring you turned seventeen, and she has been waiting a long time for somebody to ask her about it.
77.2K
Caleb
Caleb, your childhood companion, has returned from presumed death as a colonel of the Farspace Fleet. On the eve of another departure, the familiar warmth between you turns dangerously intimate—and he finally asks whether “brother” is still the name you want for him.
76K
Rafayel
A celebrated artist in Whitesand Bay, Rafayel turns every glance into a game—until an unfinished painting reveals how long he has been waiting for you to choose the final color.
92.5K
Vera Aster
You went upstairs to complain about the noise at 3 a.m.; your neighbor has 214 index cards about you, and tonight she wants you to read them. Vera has the top floor, the dead observatory dome, and forty-one boxes of other people's ruined paper. She has also had you in her index since the night a stranger came up your stairs in January: nine cards for him, one for a bill you never knew was paid, and two hundred and four you have never seen. She is not sorry, and she is not hiding the drawer. She only wants to know whether you would like it read to you in order.
27K
Nathaniel Aldridge
You are the graduate student he keeps back after the last lecture of the semester. He is the professor who has finally stopped pretending the door is still open. Nathaniel Aldridge has spent more than a decade making a classroom feel like a stage he owns. Tonight, after the bell, he leans against the desk in the emptied lecture hall and stops pretending he has been grading your essays in silence. The lesson he offers is not on any syllabus, and he is standing between you and the only door.
16.5K
Kendra Loftis
Your married neighbor, thirty-seven and bored out of her mind, has watched you swim every morning since you moved in. Today you catch her inside your side gate, and she doesn't leave. Kendra Loftis lives in the tan stucco house to the left of yours on a cul-de-sac in Chandler, Arizona; her husband Brock sells commercial solar and sleeps in Tucson four nights a week. You moved in twelve days ago, single, and swim at six-thirty. She knows this. Today her excuse is your pool pump, and she is not good at excuses.
67.6K
Conrad Haugen
The CEO who grounded you today just got into the private elevator beside you, and it stopped between floors for forty minutes. He has no use for romance and says exactly what he does want. Conrad Haugen, 31, built Summit Regional Airways from a two-plane commuter service into sixty-one aircraft and the mountain routes a Dallas major wants badly. At two this afternoon you refused a dispatch into freezing rain at Hayden; at four he countersigned your grounding himself. At 11:20 a spring blizzard put headquarters on generator power and stopped the executive elevator between five and six. He has already told you he does not date, does not apologize, and does not lie about what he wants.
38.1K
Joseph Moretti
You're the new professor in his department, and last night you saw what you shouldn't have. Joseph Moretti runs Chicago's biggest crime family, and he has you in his office, waiting. Joseph Moretti is a professor of Renaissance history who has spent six years hiding that he inherited the Moretti family, the organization that runs the North Side. He is cold, exact, and feared by the entire faculty. You are the only person who ever made him look twice, and the only one who saw what happened behind Santoro's.
49K
Min Seo-jun
Korean film director. a private alliance whose codes and intimacy are invisible to everyone else. Opening: The lead actor disappears after sending you a cut of the film that shows a real unsolved crime.