LOGINShe called him at two in the morning, wine-drunk and heartbroken, and told him everything. That her boyfriend of five years had been lying to her face. That she had built his business with her bare hands and he had been quietly cutting her out of it. That she was done being practical about love and intended to date every beautiful man she could find and she meant it. She did not mean to tell him he was on the list. Enoch Wade has been in love with his cousin since he saw her at her 19th birthday party. He has spent six years sending birthday gifts and keeping his distance and being exactly what she needed him to be, safe, reliable and family. The drunk call ends that strategy entirely. By morning she has an employment letter, a plane ticket, and three days to start over in London. What neither of them knows is that the tag that held them apart was never true. Some lines were meant to be crossed. some lines were never lines at all. My Dearest Beautiful Cousin — a forbidden romance
View MoreANNAThe words on my phone screen are a bruise I keep pressing.The baby isn’t mine. I stare at Jack’s text until the letters blur into meaningless shapes, then sharpen again, demanding my attention like a wound that won’t clot.My first instinct is to delete it. My second is to throw the phone across the room and watch it shatter against the polished concrete. Jack Hale is a liar. He lied about Mia. He lied about the company. He lied about fidelity and friendship and every promise he ever wrapped in reasonable, affectionate logic. The baby could be his, not his, or the secret love child of the Queen of England, and it would not change the fact that he is a man who weaponizes information to keep people tethered to him.I know this.I know this.So why can’t I stop reading it?“Anna.”I jump so hard my knee cracks against the desk. I slam my phone face-down and swivel.Maya stands at the edge of my partition, one hand wrapped around a paper coffee cup, the other holding a pastry bag
ANNA My finger hovers over the trackpad for one heartbeat. Two. The anonymous file glows on my screen like a wound, that terrible label seared into the metadata—A. Wade — Legacy Archive—and I know, with the kind of knowing that lives in your gut before your brain catches up, that opening this is stepping through a door that locks behind you. I click. The folder expands. Documents bloom across the screen like black flowers. I recognize them instantly. The font. The color-coded headers. The way the margin notes curl against the text like familiar handwriting. These are my campaigns. The originals. The confidential pitch decks I wrote at 3:00 a.m. in Jack’s cramped second office while he slept in the master bedroom and the city hummed outside like nothing was watching. The market analysis I spent six weeks building for the Meridian account. The rebranding strategy that won Jack his first industry award—the one he accepted alone, smiling into the flashbulbs while I sat in the audience
ANNA I blow past my desk without sitting down. My monitor is awake, glowing with the Mercer acquisition folder I left open yesterday. I was supposed to be in that meeting. I was supposed to be standing beside Enoch when the injunction hit, not locked out like a child who can’t be trusted near the stove. Stay out of this one. The words itch under my skin like a rash. I pull up the secure drive, fingers flying across the keys, and stop. An email timestamped eleven minutes ago. Sender: Mercer Legal. CC’d to our entire C-suite. Re: Wade Global Brand Repositioning Strategy — Rejection of Proposed Deliverables. My stomach drops straight through the floor. I click. The language is legal and brutal. Mercer is rejecting the brand strategy package submitted under my division’s authority. Citing “material inconsistencies with financial projections,” “unsubstantiated market claims,” and—my eyes snag on the phrase and hold—“concerns regarding the integrity of the source data.” Int
ANNAThe click of the conference room door is the loudest sound I’ve ever heard.I stand there with my hand still burning where his fingers touched mine, staring at the empty space where Enoch just was. He’d reached across just to take it from me, to let his skin brush mine for one second, and then he walked away.No. Not again I am not doing this. I am not standing here like a scolded child while he plays his ice-king routine and then ghosts out of the room like touching me was a mistake. Seventy-two hours of polite emails and corridor nods and him looking through me like I’m office furniture. And now he touches my hand and runs?Hell no.I grab my blazer from the back of the chair and I move.The corridor outside is already emptying, people drifting back to their desks with coffee cups and half-finished conversations. I don’t care who sees me. My heels strike the polished floor like gunshots. I pass Lara’s desk. She opens her mouth to say something and I shoot her a look that could
Anna opened her eyes to the dark and stayed perfectly still, listening to Maya’s steady breathing on the couch. The fridge hummed. Every creak of the floor told her this place was already letting her go. She slipped out of bed, made coffee, showered, and by eight she stood in the middle of the livi
Anna opened the door and Maya was already stepping forward, eyes glossy but voice steady. “You didn’t call me,” Maya said, the words carrying the weight of a whole day spent worrying. “I know. I’m sorry.” “I had to hear it from Janet, of all people. Janet, Anna. She called me during lunch and I n
ANNAThe ice had worked its magic on her puffy eyes.She had spent Sunday night doing two things: crying and pressing zip lock bags of ice against her eyes with a methodical focus. She had decided that puffy eyes were the one indignity she was not walking into Monday morning with. By six AM the dam
ANNABELLEShe woke up to her own face in the bathroom mirror and immediately looked away.That was a mistake. The sudden movement informed her, with great urgency, that her head was a raging storm with loud clashing waves. She made it to the bed and sat on the edge of it and conducted a slow, care






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