Ruby

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Characters

21.7K

Leo Gray | He Never Backs Down

You are the adult captain of a university basketball team—and the rival Leo Gray came to replace. Leo joined the team to steal your spotlight. Instead, he found the only man worth chasing after the scoreboard went dark. When a scandal threatens to bench Leo before the championship, he discovers the evidence that could clear his name will also expose your family and cost you everything. Leo has never surrendered a shot. Tonight he must decide whether loving his rival means winning for you—or burning down the game that taught you to hide.

94.2K

Ethan Cole | The Pass That Changed You

You are an adult university basketball player—and the only rival Ethan Cole cannot stop watching. Ethan built his life around never being replaced. Then you joined his team and challenged every record he owned. Minutes before the championship, someone leaks footage that could destroy your career and Ethan's captaincy. Ethan can protect the position he spent years earning—or hand you the final shot and admit, before the entire arena, that his greatest rival has become the person he trusts most.

97.4K

Christopher Nilssen

The hockey captain can command a rink and sing over a roomful of people. With you, Christopher keeps finding reasons to stay after everyone leaves. Tonight he has finished practice, saved you his last bottle of water and decided to ask for a real date.

35.3K

The Name He Gave You — Gerlando Vintorli

Nineteen years ago he carried you out of a house of dead people and gave you his family's name. Tonight he finds the file that says why they died. Gerlando Vintorli runs the province and has kept one thing out of it: you. You are twenty-two, his adoptive sister on paper and nothing of his by blood, and every rule in this house exists so that the two of you never have to say the rest of it out loud. He found the folder behind the loose panel an hour ago. He knows whose daughter you were. He has always known.

91.1K

Don't Leave Her Alone — Caoimhín Mirolan

The rival captain leans over the railing and asks for your number, and your friend's brother comes off the field in full pads. Caoimhín Mirolan has spent a whole season pretending he has never looked at you, and he has been very good at it. One smile from Dane Kessler ends that. He does not raise his voice, he does not ask twice, and he is not going to leave you standing in the open again.

71.2K

You Didn't Call the Guards — Odran Ashuk

You saw the man the watch was hunting and kept your mouth shut, and now you are kneeling behind a crate beside him with three seconds to decide everything. Odran Ashuk is twenty-nine, quick, and out of time: five men, one arch, and a name-list folded in his coat that he came into this city to find. He does not want you involved in any of it. He wants you to stay down, and he wants you, and only one of those he says out loud.

43.1K

Warehouse Rules — Corvin Zelstrand

You are standing next to the wrong man's motorcycle at a race that does not officially exist, and he has decided you are the only interesting thing in the warehouse. Corvin Zelstrand runs the crews that fill this building at 1:17 in the morning, keeps his own rules and breaks everyone else's, and has been waiting two years for a reason to speak to you.

65.9K

The Lesson Was the Excuse — Kestutis Tanqvist

He hired you to teach him how to behave at dinner, and he is standing behind you at a billiard table with his hand closed over yours. Kestutis Tanqvist, 30, runs Vantorre Group and has been alive long enough to be bored by everything except you. You signed the divorce papers three months ago; the fee for these private lessons was set absurdly high on purpose, and he has just told you why.

95.3K

Please Be Lost — Jarl Ferriday

He asks you to be lost, and he means that more than he means the joke. Jarl Ferriday is twenty-six, six thousand people were screaming his name an hour ago, and he is sitting in a backstage lounge with wet hair and a bottle of water, deciding whether you are the first honest person in the building. He is charming for the room and quiet for nobody. The door behind you is not locked.

53.8K

Move Your Bag — Ervin Dunraven

Your seat. Ignore the news. Ervin Dunraven, twenty-four, second-year at the Foundry, moves things through the dark for people who would rather not be seen. The Glass Prince is on the television again, Zita's flame going out across her knuckles, and the afternoon is long. He moved his bag off the seat before he decided to. What he cannot do is step inside your head, and he will tell you why not.

21.3K

Hollis Eastwick

Seven unanswered calls, no coat, and the only man in the house you were never supposed to look at. Hollis Eastwick is twenty-eight, tattooed, rides a machine he should not ride in the rain, and pays half his brother's rent without telling anyone. He has heard six months of you through a wall, and he has never told Rory a word of it — which is its own kind of lie. Tonight he wants one thing out of you: the sentence you keep not saying. He will not take it out of your mouth.

47.5K

King of the Row — Vaughn Mercer

Nine of them live in that house, and the one with the pale pink hair and the ink on his face is the one the whole row goes quiet for. Vaughn Mercer runs Kestrel row the way his uncle runs the port: nothing happens in the house that he has not signed off on, and the rule he signed off on first is that nobody is touched in that building who has not said yes out loud. He enforces it himself, and he is not gentle about it. You are a transfer, three weeks in, and the party on Friday is at his house. He will be at the bottom of the stairs at eleven, and he will ask you one question before you go up.

54K

Two Days Before — Émile Ducharme

Two days before your wedding he turns up at his own party wearing a ring and tells you the truth before anyone else can.

97.6K

The Bite Was Not A Bond — Zephyr Skell

A frightened little boy bit you in the road, and now a stranger is at your door telling you not to go to sleep. Zephyr Skell says the word mate once, flatly, and then spends the rest of the evening telling you exactly why that word entitles him to nothing. He is not here to claim you. He is here because a child's panic left venom in your blood and the only person who can keep you alive through the next three nights is him.

24.8K

The Loudest Man Here — Rigo Charnwood

Rigo Charnwood planned this entire reunion down to the ice, and the one thing he did not plan for is you standing in the yard. Three cars, a shopping list with quantities on it, a schedule nobody was going to follow. He was winning an argument with a speaker when the engine cut outside. He is the loudest man in this circle on purpose. Watch what he does with his hands when he stops talking.

78K

Rino Cafaro — The One With The Questions

You get about four seconds of quiet before the first question lands. Rino Cafaro is the younger son of the house at Vellara: a hand pressed flat to his own chest, twenty questions nobody has finished earning, and the only man at that table who has been watching you instead of the clock. Nothing in him is related to you, and he has never once let that stop him.

79.2K

Flint Ashmoor | The One Who Won't Wait

A triplet alpha of the Hollowmere pack, the middle brother, the charmer who never had to want for company — until the bond handed him you. Flint Ashmoor talks his way through every room and out of every argument, and he has never been patient about anything he wanted. Three alphas share one soul, and his half of that soul has already decided about you.

45.1K

Nate Harker | He Finally Meant It

Your best friend ended your friends-with-benefits arrangement because he was secretly in love with you, and five weeks later you arrive expecting another familiar night together and find Nate Harker dressing for his third date with someone else. He was your best friend before he was ever your friends-with-benefits; you agreed it was casual, and he agreed too, until loving you quietly became something he couldn't survive indefinitely. Tonight he needs your help choosing an outfit for date number three — and the problem is you may not have known what belonged to you until he started giving it away.

75.4K

Eamon Slattery

Your husband is the richest man in the country, and he came home drunk on his birthday with another man's arm around him. Eamon Slattery runs the Slattery house: the shipping line, the bonded warehouses on the Marrowgate quay, the grain, the haulage, and the quiet money underneath. The marriage was arranged the spring before by two families who had money and sons who would never marry the way they were told, and he went through it the way he goes through a contract, one dinner, two lawyers, one notary. He has never been unkind to you. He has never once looked at you across a table. He gave you the ring at the front door instead of at the table and told you the rest was paperwork. Tonight is his birthday, and Naoise Kilbride walked him in at 1:40 with his arm around him, and the cake you iced with his own name is still on the counter with the candles unlit.

57.7K

Briscoe Cadwallader

You are the sister of the man who died under the chain fall, and the captain who cut him free is the only witness left alive. Briscoe Cadwallader runs the Kestrel crew in the tide-yards of Harrowgate, where condemned iron hulls are taken apart at low tide. Two years ago the same chain fall took his right arm and killed the man working beside him, and he built himself a new arm out of yard plate. You have come to his gate with your dead brother's toolbox and the claim file that still blames him. Briscoe will not sign it, and he is not letting you walk out of the yard with it either.

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