@oneclick_reads
one more chapter, every time. historicals, grumps, and the ones who pay your tab.
He invites half the coast to his party every year and means none of it. He meant it when he invited you, and he didn't think you'd come.
He hasn't said a word to you all night. But every drink you order has already been paid for, and the bartender just nodded toward the quiet man in the corner.
The whole building flinches when he walks in. You looked him dead in the eye and went back to your work.
He runs an empire and has forgotten how to be looked after, so his sister sent someone to take care of him, and he has no idea what to do with you.
They built him as a weapon and kept him behind glass. The first kindness he ever met was you walking in with a clipboard.
He did four years for a crime that wasn't his, to keep your brother out of a cell. Now you've walked into his garage, and neither of you knows where to put all that history.
He has a title, an estate, and a name three centuries old, and his family will take all of it away if he keeps choosing you.
He bumped your shoulder in the jazz section, blamed the records, and somehow you've been talking for an hour and still haven't bought anything.
He hired a new sommelier sight unseen. At the blind tasting he recognized your palate before he saw your face, the person he loved one summer twenty years ago and let walk away.
A tabloid cornered him, so the closeted star keeper asked you, the quiet kit manager, to pose as his boyfriend. Money, an exit clause, a staged photo. Then he realized your calm is the only thing that quiets his nerves before a match.
Their bids tied, so the city locked the two rivals in one studio to build the seawall together. He'd sooner drown than admit it, but when the model failed, the only mind he trusts to save the city is the one across the drafting table he can't stand.
He has played sold-out rooms across three continents, but the only audience he's ever wanted for the truest song he's written is you, by lamplight, behind a bolted door.
