Conflict of Interest
He was sent to save her magazine. The reader knows he came to bury it.
Celeste Bianchi has spent a decade as the uncredited creative soul of Aperture, the brilliant one whose name never makes the masthead, who turns off the lights and lays out the pages by hand when no one is watching. The magazine isn't her job. It's the only family she's ever had. And it's months from going under.
Then Dominic Thorne arrives: cool, exacting, devastatingly composed, the rescue investor the board has pinned its survival on. He's everything she should resent. Instead, he watches her work like no one ever has, remembers every word she says, and sees the woman the world keeps overlooking. The bylaws forbid it. Her deepest fear forbids it. She falls anyway.
But you know what Celeste doesn't. The man building the relaunch at her side, the man whose stillness reads as intimacy in the dark of an emptied office, is hiding what he really is. And the rescue she's pouring her life into may be the very thing designed to end it. Every charged near-miss is also a noose pulling tight. And the slow burn is about to cross a line neither of them can undo.
Tropes & heat: forbidden workplace romance - enemies/rivals-to-lovers - secret identity (dramatic irony, you're in on it from page one) - forced proximity - slow burn - guarded hero / warm heroine - found family - billionaire-adjacent - 3/5 open-door, emotion-forward - guaranteed HEA - no cheating.
The line gets crossed. The trap gets tighter. And she's falling for the signature on her own execution order.
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