SINFUL AWAKENING
Jade Mercer has spent nine years building her marketing firm on precision, discipline, and the deliberate decision to be underestimated. She walks into rooms and lets people assume she is the least dangerous person in them. Then she uses it. It has worked perfectly. It has also cost her everything warm and alive in herself that had nothing to do with ambition.
Dominic Crest is the kind of man empires are built around and people are destroyed by. Ruthless, magnetic, and carrying a past he has weaponised into motivation, he has never wanted anything he did not eventually take. When Jade walks into his boardroom and refuses to look at him, he decides he wants her before she has finished her second slide.
What begins as a single reckless Tuesday afternoon becomes something neither of them have language for. Jade discovers, one undone night at a time, that she has been starving herself of her own hunger for years, and that Dominic is the first person who has ever looked at her and seen exactly what she was hiding beneath the competence and the careful dresses.
But Dominic's world is not clean. His past is populated with dangerous people, buried debts, and a woman from his history who does not accept endings. As Jade falls deeper into his orbit, the line between desire and destruction begins to blur in ways that could cost her everything she built.
Sinful Awakening is a story about a woman who stopped apologising for her appetite. About power and who really holds it. About the specific madness of wanting someone who is genuinely bad for your carefully constructed life, and choosing them anyway, with both eyes open and no intention of stopping.
읽기
Chapter: Chapter 18: WednesdayDana organized the celebration with the efficiency of someone who had been waiting for a reason.By eleven in the morning there was food on the central table of the open floor, the good kind, not the performative sad sandwiches of a standard office gathering but actual food from the Lebanese place two blocks away that the team had been using as a benchmark for how well a given week was going. A good week was Lebanese. A bad week was whatever was closest. This was apparently a Lebanese week of the highest order.Jade stood at the edge of the floor and watched her team assemble around the table and felt the specific satisfaction of having built something that worked. Not just the campaign. The room. The people in it. The particular culture of a floor that had had four directors before her and had learned to wait out leadership rather than invest in it.They were not waiting her out.She could feel the difference.Dana appeared at her shoulder. "Ryan brought the food," she said, quietly
최신 업데이트: 2026-03-17
Chapter: Chapter 17: The LetterHe took her to the Italian place.Not a different restaurant, not somewhere new and impressive and appropriate to the occasion. The sixteen tables and the wine bottle candles and the menu that had not changed in twenty years, his mother's Friday night restaurant, the place that fed you like it meant it.She understood immediately why he had chosen it.They sat at the corner table and the bread arrived and the wine arrived and he looked at her across the small distance between them with the full quality of his attention and said: "Tell me everything."So she did.She told him about Priya's call. Her mother's name on the third layer. The trust established twenty-six years ago with Harmon's capital. She told him what Harmon had said in the presentation room, the eight months and the pregnancy and the cowardice he had named without prompting, the trust he had established against her mother's refusal, the intelligence firm engaged seven months ago by a man following a life he had no right
최신 업데이트: 2026-03-16
Chapter: Chapter 16: The Third LayerPriya called at eight forty-seven on Tuesday morning.Jade was at her desk with coffee and the Valen presentation open on her screen, the final version, the one she had built across four weeks of chaos and clarity and everything in between. The presentation was in three hours. Marcus Harmon was arriving at eleven thirty. The account that had started all of this was about to either close or collapse and she had done everything within her considerable capability to ensure it closed.And now Priya was calling.She answered."I have the third layer," Priya said.Jade set down her coffee. "Tell me.""The Singapore entity is a trust structure," Priya said. "Old money, multi-generational, the kind of vehicle families use to hold assets across decades without visibility. It took my contact in Singapore forty-eight hours to get past the registration." A pause. "The beneficiary of the trust, and therefore the ultimate client of the intelligence firm, is not Marcus Harmon."Jade was very still.
최신 업데이트: 2026-03-16
Chapter: Chapter 15: The CoastThey left Friday at noon.Dominic drove, which surprised her. She had assumed a driver, had assumed the particular management of comfort that came with his level of resource, but he pulled up outside her building in a dark car she had not seen before, something lower and faster than his city car, and he was behind the wheel himself in a grey shirt with no tie and his sleeves already rolled and she stood on the pavement with her bag and looked at him through the windscreen and felt something ease in her chest.This was the version of him that existed outside the building.She was about to spend two days learning him.She got in.They drove out of the city with the Friday traffic thinning as they cleared the centre and the buildings giving way to the broader sky of the periphery and then the motorway opening ahead of them and the speed coming up and Dominic driving with the relaxed competence of someone who genuinely enjoyed it, one hand on the wheel, the window cracked, music low.She
최신 업데이트: 2026-03-15
Chapter: Chapter 14: AftermathThe suspension letter reached Marcus Webb at eleven forty-three.Jade knew the precise time because Dana texted her from the floor: Webb just left the building. Security escort. Everyone saw.She read the message and set her phone face down on her desk and sat for a moment with the quiet satisfaction of something resolved and the complicated weight of knowing that resolved was not the same as finished. Webb would lawyer up before the day was out. The forensic accounting team Priya had arranged would spend weeks inside the company's systems. There would be depositions and documents and the long slow machinery of legal consequence grinding through its process.But he was out of the building.That mattered.She went back to the Valen pitch, which was where she had been before the board meeting and where she intended to return now that the morning had done what it needed to do. She had two days before the formal presentation to Marcus Harmon and she was not going to let the weight of ever
최신 업데이트: 2026-03-15
Chapter: Chapter 13: TuesdayShe wore the navy dress.Not the red one. Not the grey. The navy wrap dress she had chosen on her first day specifically to disappear in, the one she had pulled from her wardrobe on the morning she walked into Crest Holdings with seventeen slides and a presentation she had rehearsed until the words stopped meaning anything.She put it on Tuesday morning and looked at herself in her mirror and understood exactly what she was doing. She was not dressing to disappear. She was dressing to remind herself and anyone who cared to notice that the woman who had walked into that building in this dress had been underestimated completely and had used every second of that underestimation to build something nobody had seen coming.She pinned her hair up.She picked up her bag.She went.Dominic was already in his office when she arrived at seven thirty, which meant he had probably been there since six. He looked up when she came in and his eyes moved over the navy dress and something passed through
최신 업데이트: 2026-03-12
로그인
