Options Handbook

When Callie returns home for the summer, staying at her best friend Mia's house feels like slipping back into childhood, until she sees Grayson Carter again. Once her best friend's quiet, overworked dad, Grayson is now older, rougher, and dangerously irresistible. He remembers her as a girl with ink-stained fingers and a reckless laugh. Now, she is a woman who is confident, sharp-tongued, and completely off-limits. Neither of them meant to start crossing lines. But whispered glances turn into midnight encounters. Denial becomes an obsession. And one forbidden moment changes everything. As passion collides with guilt, Callie and Grayson are forced to choose between the love they shouldn't want and the consequences they can't escape. Off Limits is a slow-burn forbidden romance filled with raw chemistry, emotional damage, and a love story that is anything but clean.

Desperation forces Lila Hart, a young woman burdened by debt and family responsibility, into signing a surrogacy contract she never imagined for herself. The agreement is clear, clinical, and emotionless: carry the child of billionaire Adrian Blackwood, deliver the heir, and walk away. For Adrian, the contract is nothing more than business. He needs an heir, not complications. Love, attachment, and emotion have no place in his controlled world of wealth and power. But as Lila moves into Adrian’s world under strict medical supervision, the lines between obligation and desire begin to blur. Her warmth challenges his emotional walls, while his quiet protection makes her question the promise she made to leave once the baby is born. External pressures mount—interfering family, legal boundaries, and society’s judgment threaten to pull them apart. As the pregnancy deepens, so does the bond neither of them planned for. When the child is finally born, Adrian must face the truth he’s been running from: some contracts can be signed, but others must be torn apart. To keep the woman who changed his life, he must choose love over control. From Contract to Forever is a story of unexpected love, emotional vulnerability, and the courage it takes to rewrite destiny when the heart refuses to follow the rules.

Eric Winter controls everything around him with obsessive precision: businesses, contracts, people… and most of all, his own emotions. To him, relationships have always been simple. Desire. Clear rules. No room for attachment. That’s exactly why the contracts exist. Stevan, on the other hand, has spent most of his life surviving. By day, he endures an abusive boss inside the multinational company where he works. At night, he takes jobs he never imagined he’d accept just to keep paying for his sick mother’s treatment. Quiet, insecure, and far too used to swallowing humiliation in silence, Stevan has never believed he was the kind of man someone would truly choose. But everything changes the night Eric finds him in a VIP room. What should have been just another proposition quickly turns into something dangerous. Because Stevan doesn’t respond to Eric the way other men do. And for the first time in years, Eric loses control of himself. Between lingering stares, restrained desire, and rules breaking one by one, the two of them become trapped in a relationship that was never supposed to go beyond the limits of a contract. The problem is, some feelings don’t obey clauses. And Eric realizes far too late that maybe he doesn’t just want Stevan’s body. Maybe he wants all of him.

"Stable. Good on paper." When Camille Vann read those four words on her husband's phone, Derek was spending his third consecutive night at a four-star hotel with his married ex-girlfriend. It was the exact evaluation Derek had given Camille just two weeks before proposing to her. In his eyes, Camille was never the love of his life. She was merely the sensible, "good on paper" choice, while he promised his lover he would never stop caring for her. Camille did not scream. She did not cry. With chilling composure, she cloned his messages, screenshotted the evidence, and backed everything up to a hidden email account he didn't even know existed. If Derek wanted a calculated marriage, she would give him a clinical execution. Then, she dialed the one number that would change everything: the husband of her husband's lover. Rhys Callahan is cold, sharp, and highly intelligent. Brought together by a shared betrayal, Camille and Rhys meet over coffee, dismantling two marriages with the quiet efficiency of professional strategists. But as their transactional alliance deepens, Camille realizes Rhys is the only person who truly sees past her mask of composure and the growing tension between them becomes impossible to ignore. Just as they prepare to deliver the final blow, their targets retaliate. Trapped inside a dangerous game of narrative control, Camille must decide how far she is willing to go. When your enemies have spent years preparing weapons for your ruin, can a calculated alliance turn into the one thing you never planned to protect?

Julian Vane is the "Ice King" of Wall Street—a man of cold logic and zero scandals. Maya Rossi is a struggling creative who can barely pay her rent. When Maya accidentally live-streams Julian in a moment of utter, dorky vulnerability, his stock prices plummet along with his reputation. To save his empire, Julian’s PR team crafts a lie: Maya isn't a trespasser; she’s his secret fiancée. Now, Maya is traded from her cramped apartment to a glass penthouse, forced to play the doting lover to a man who treats romance like a hostile takeover. But as the cameras roll and the "likes" pour in, the lines between their contract and their chemistry begin to blur.

Clara Sterling is twenty-seven, polished, and on the move. After being wrongly blamed for a student’s breakdown at her previous school in Boston, she accepts a mid-semester teaching position at Blackwood, a prestigious private academy known for its reputation and the secrets. She hopes for a fresh start. Instead, she encounters Gabriel Vane. At nineteen, Gabriel is sharp and carries an unexpressed grief. He is the student who resists management and demands attention. After losing a year to his father’s death, he returns to Blackwood feeling incomplete but more unpredictable. When Clara steps into Room 14 on her first day and meets his intellectual challenge, something inside him stirs for the first time in a long while. What starts as a battle of wits over a poetry anthology evolves into a connection neither can put into words or control. Gabriel hacks into her private file, and instead of reporting it, Clara replies to his note. The distinction between teacher and student blurs gradually until one rainy Tuesday afternoon in a locked classroom, it vanishes completely. Yet Blackwood is keeping an eye on them. Someone has reported their interactions to the headmistress. Even worse, someone removed pages from Clara’s file before her arrival, indicating that she didn’t get the job despite her scandal in Boston. She was chosen because of it. As their relationship deepens and threats converge, both Clara and Gabriel must confront the same question: what does it cost to want something you were never meant to have? The Lesson Plan is a dark, slow-burning forbidden romance about desire, grief, and the precarious space between authority and intimacy.