Book Maker

He just paid eleven thousand dollars for one night with a girl who's never once been impressed by his last name. She's about to find out that's exactly why he can't stop looking at her.
Wren Callahan doesn't have room in her life for a Sterling. Not with finals bearing down, her grandmother's sixty-year-old sourdough starter to keep alive in a dorm mini-fridge that was never built for it, and a slow, sweet almost-something with Micah from the vet clinic that she's still working up the nerve to call anything at all. She definitely doesn't have room for Knox Sterling — heir to the city's most exclusive private club, weaponized smirk, a reputation three years deep that everyone on campus seems to have a story about. She's spent two years successfully avoiding his orbit entirely, easy enough, until her best friend starts dating his younger brother and Wren finds herself dragged to a charity bachelor auction she wanted no part of, watching Knox Sterling's hand go up, and up, and up, until he's paid more for one date with her than she makes in a semester.
Knox has spent his whole life being the Sterling who keeps the books — officially for the family's membership club, unofficially for the private, high-stakes backroom his father's run for twenty years and has no intention of ever letting go of. He's good at calculating odds. He's never once been able to calculate why the one girl on campus who's never wanted a single thing from him is the only one he can't stop thinking about. He tells himself the auction bid is impulse. He knows, the second she opens the door to their date scowling and gorgeous and entirely unimpressed, that it isn't.
What starts as one overpriced night becomes something neither of them planned for — except Knox is keeping a family secret that could cost Wren everything if she gets close enough to it, and Wren is one discovery away from finding out that the boy she's falling for is exactly as much trouble as everyone warned her he'd be.
Tropes: College Billionaire Romance • He Falls First (and Won't Say It) • Forbidden-ish (Family Secret) • Dating Auction Meet • Best Friends Dating Brothers • Grovel Arc