Forbidden Bonds with Him

There is a word for what Arthur Sterling is to Chloe Vance. The law put it in writing twelve years ago, stamped it with a court seal, and filed it somewhere neither of them can reach. The word is brother. They have spent the better part of a decade pretending it fits.

It doesn't.

For two years they lived under the same roof, breathed the same air, and crossed every line that word was supposed to hold in place. For two years after that, she was in Paris, and he was in Elysium City, and the distance was supposed to fix what the closeness had broken. She built a life. He built more walls. And somewhere between the Atlantic Ocean and a maxed-out business account, they both got very good at acting like it was over.

Then she came home.

Not for him — she'd made that decision in Paris, and she was sticking to it. She came back to catch her arranged fiancé with his hands where they didn't belong, to salvage her atelier before it collapsed under its own debt, and to reclaim her father's stolen legacy before her uncle sold it out from under her. Clean objectives. A clean timeline. No room for complications.

She didn't account for him still being there. Still watching. Still the only person in any room who looks at her like she's worth the wreckage.

Arthur Sterling has controlled every variable in his life since he was eight years old and learned what it costs to lose something. Chloe Vance is the one equation he has never been able to solve — not when she was the girl he was supposed to protect, not when she became the woman he couldn't stay away from, and not now, two years later, when she's standing back in his city looking like she's already decided he's the enemy.

Two years of silence. Two years of separate lives. Two years that changed absolutely nothing about the way he looks at her, and everything about how much she's trying not to look back.

They were never supposed to happen. They happened anyway. And now that she's back —

Neither of them knows how to stop.*