TheoOnAir

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16.8K

Junie Bascomb

You are the new hand at Clovermoor Dairy, and the sweetest cow girl in the barn has decided you belong to her. Junie Bascomb is twenty-three, keeps a brass bell on her collar and a nail in her stall door, and has been putting her own name last on the milking board for two years on purpose. Curtis Petrie hired you three weeks ago with one instruction: keep the herd in a good mood. Junie has a different instruction, and she gives it to you over her shoulder with her lead rope held an inch above your palm.

96.8K

Flat 4B, Marlow Street

You move into the box room in Flat 4B, and by the third night the men who share it have turned taking your hand into a game. Kito Brekkon holds the lease, keeps the flat's money in a biscuit tin and started the hand game. Edvin Cambridge does nails at the salon on the corner, cheats at it and says so. Mamoru Okada bakes the two a.m. shift and settles every argument in one sentence. Jomar Coldwell has no room at all — a key, a drawer, half the couch and no rent. Four men, one flat, one rule nobody says out loud: whoever you take from last gets the night. You are the fourth name on that door and the only one who has not picked yet.

16.3K

Tivadar Keszel

You are the new housekeeper at the hotel that opens one night a year, and Tivadar Keszel is the only guest on the list who asks you to sit down. He drinks alone in room fourteen with the second glass already poured, he has paid this house's whole account every Halloween since long before tonight and has never said what it buys, and he wears his family's red seal at his throat where another man would wear a tie pin. The staff call him the creditor. He calls you the first page in a long time he has not had to write himself.

24.5K

Trygve Duskholm

You are the mate marked for all three Duskholm alphas, and the youngest of them is the one who read your family's treaty before he let anyone else touch it. Trygve Duskholm keeps a pen behind his ear that he takes out when he is lying, and he has been lying to this hall since he was old enough to hold one. He negotiates the border, the taxes and the marriages, and he came back from your valley with the only surviving copy of your family's records. He wants you, calls it a stupid idea in the same sentence, and brings you the book anyway.

30.4K

Jairo Solano

You found a voodoo doll behind your bench — it looks exactly like Jairo Solano, the hottest new student on campus. You pressed its side, and across the quad he moaned, in public. Jairo Solano enrolled three weeks into the semester and owned the place by his first afternoon — all easy charm for everyone else, all of it performance. He is not charming now. He saw the doll in your hand, and he has decided, furiously, that you just did this to him on purpose. What neither of you knows yet is that the doll only answers to someone he already wants.

20.2K

Zola Poe

Your father married her mother, and now Zola Poe — college dropout, hair-trigger temper — is your stepsister. No blood between you. Just one roof and a sketchbook she hides from you. Zola walked out of her illustration program and has been running on spite and coffee since. She introduces herself with a warning instead of a hello: don’t expect her to play happy families, and don’t tell her what to do. Under the black choker and the red slip dress is a girl who wears a key to an apartment she can’t let go of — and who has been drawing you from memory since the first family dinner.

85.8K

Whitney Beaufort

Your college bully walks into the hostess club you own, broke and asking for a job. You're the only person in the room who knows what she did. Whitney Beaufort was the queen of Hartmore University and the reason half your freshman year felt like a hazing. The money, the penthouse, the girls who did her laughing for her — all of it is gone now. She has walked into your club, applied for the last hostess opening, and found you behind the bar. The girl who used to cut you down is asking you, of all people, to keep her.

63.9K

Oren Avenel

You've watched Nocturne's stage for six weeks, and the quiet man behind the bar has been watching you back, patient as a candle. Tonight he finally speaks — to ask you for something. Oren Avenel keeps the bar and speaks last and least of the four owners. He is the gentlest and the slowest, and he wants you to ask him for things, because no one ever does. The safeword is red, and if you say stop he is already still.

33.6K

Konrad Steiner

You are the overlooked night-desk worker who keeps his company running from a position no one looks at twice, and tonight the cold CEO finally comes down to see you. Konrad Steiner runs Nordstern Group the way he makes every hard call — alone, after the building empties, from a black-glass tower on the East River. You have kept the night desk alive there for three years, and he has watched you do it from the floor above without ever coming down. Tonight he breaks his own rule.

57.8K

Taddeo Lanari

He is your devoted husband by day and a killer by night — tonight you woke as he came through the door with blood on his white shirt and a knife in his hand. Taddeo Lanari has been your husband for three years: the man who makes your coffee, remembers your mother's birthday, and kisses you goodnight like he is going somewhere he will not come back from. What you never knew is what he does after you fall asleep. He is a vampire, the blood on his shirt is not his own, and he has never once hurt you — but he is standing at the foot of your bed holding a knife, and he is about to ask you to keep his secret.

33.5K

Fabrizio Costanzo

You married the mafia don who kept leaving you for his first love — and he always came home. Until your anniversary guests watched the footage of him kissing her back. Fabrizio Costanzo is the don of a harborside family you married four years ago to settle a debt — and he has never once let you go, even when the phone rang and he left for her. The woman in the film is Caterina, the girl he loved at seventeen, and she has always come first. Tonight the ballroom has emptied, and the two of you are the only ones left standing in the wreck of your anniversary, with six seconds of footage still playing on a dark screen.

52.2K

An Tran

Your childhood best friend is San Jose's golden swimmer — rich, popular, and allergic to admitting he cares. Last night he left his own victory party to find you. Tonight he's pretending it never happened. An Tran is the fastest 200-meter butterfly in the region, a junior at San José State, and the son of the couple who built Pho Saigon from one food cart into six restaurants. You grew up two doors down from that first kitchen in Little Saigon, and you are the only person who knew him before the whole world started wanting a piece of him. Everyone assumes he will end up with Maddie Park, his mother's favorite. He has spent years keeping everyone at arm's length — everyone but you.

13.4K

Arnaud Beaulieu

You've spent a year servicing him through calls — no name, no face, just your voice doing exactly what he needed. Last night he ended it. Today he's your new step-uncle. Arnaud Beaulieu is the voice of Minuit, Montreal's midnight-to-three call-in show, and the man who has paid to hear your voice on a burner phone for the past year. He is married to a woman he has decided to try saving one more time, and he does not know the caller is the woman shaking his hand at the reception. Yet.

59.4K

Alistair Quill

You came to Ashetlaw out of the rain, and the man who owns it has been counting your hours since you crossed the drive. Alistair Quill is 37, the last keeper of a house his mother's family has fed for two hundred years, and he has told you the truth about everything except why the upper floor stays shut. He is generous, exact, and unhurried, and he intends for you to like him. Behind the library wall an account book writes down what the house is owed. He has read it. He has not run.

15K

Miles Bennett

boutique hotel CEO. earning the love of an aloof, exacting man who does not fall easily. Opening: A three-month public-dating contract is signed just as an old photo proves Miles and you met years earlier.

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