Privilege

Explicit content. Intended for adult readers 18+.

I don't need your silence. I need it to be legally impossible for anyone to take it from you.

Liv Ashgrove has one frame left on a dying camera battery and a very good reason to run. She came to Sable Reach to photograph a salvage operation. She leaves the water having seen something that three separate men would pay a great deal to make sure she never describes out loud.

Rooke Halvard doesn't take passengers. He doesn't explain himself, he doesn't negotiate twice, and he has never once in thirty-nine years wanted something he couldn't buy outright. But the woman shivering on his deck is now the single most dangerous object in his world — and the inquiry that could gut everything his family built convenes in ninety-one days.

There's one way to make her testimony worthless. She has to belong to him. On paper. In public. In every photograph anyone bothers to take.

So he writes the terms himself. Three months. His island. His name on her hand. No questions about the wreck, no leaving the Reach, and absolutely nothing between them that isn't performance.

She signs. Because the alternative is a mainland where she can't tell which footsteps behind her are ordinary.

But Sable Reach in winter is nine rooms, one fire, and a man who has spent his whole life mistaking keeping for caring. The rules were written for an audience. There isn't one out here. And every night the ice closes another mile of water around them, the distance Rooke swore he'd maintain gets smaller, and meaner, and harder to survive.

He wanted a fiancée the lawyers couldn't touch.

Now he wants to be the only thing she's ever had to say yes to — and he's stopped pretending the contract was ever about the inquiry at all.

Ninety-one days. One lie. And a man who has never in his life given anything back to the sea.

Tropes: Fake Engagement · Billionaire · Possessive Alpha · Forced Proximity · Age Gap · Power Exchange · Guaranteed HEA

Very high heat. Explicit sexual content throughout. Standalone with HEA — no cliffhanger.