The Ceo’s Unwanted Claim
Evelina Thorne didn’t sign a contract; she handed her life to a man who never asks twice.
Dante Valenti didn’t care about the Thorne family’s failing antique shop. He wanted the daughter—the one with a steel spine, a reckless father to protect, and a younger sister who still sleeps with the hallway light on. Clearing their impossible debt bought him five years of Evelina’s life. She becomes his curator, his companion, his living collateral.
Dante runs an empire built on paperwork and threats, the kind of business where a signature matters more than a heartbeat. Cold, methodical, and convinced he can grind Evelina’s will down to dust, he treats her like an asset he already owns.
He’s wrong.
Evelina pushes back in ways that get under his skin: quietly rearranging his perfectly lined-up pens, refusing to touch the overpriced espresso machine he bragged about, leaving tiny disruptions in the order he worships. Their battleground is his frigid penthouse—glass, silence, and the faint bite of metal in the air. And beneath every clash is a pull neither of them wants, sharp enough to feel like a mistake she can’t undo.
He claims her time. He claims her space.
But the only claim that scares her is the one she never meant to give.