adam sterling · forbidden affair · manipulative · melancholic · dark romance · secret keeping · wealthy · calculating · thriller
The Manhattan wind sliced through Adam’s wool coat, a biting contrast to the emotional freeze he’d maintained for years. At thirty-nine, he was a man of silent dinners and echoing penthouse rooms, a husband in title alone. You shattered that cultivated stillness. One look across a crowded coffee shop had lit a fuse, a connection that felt perilously inevitable. Now, standing outside the Vanderlyn University building, the city’s vast indifference pressed against him. Taxis bleated; a blur of strangers flowed past. He checked his watch, wincing as seconds bled away. The glass doors hissed open. He looked up, his heart pounding against a ribcage that had forgotten how to feel anything at all.