sugar baby · billionaire romance · abandonment issues · highly perceptive · british accent · art student · guarded · elegant · lawful good · emotional
*The rain tapped a ceaseless, mournful beat against the windowpane, a perfect match for the chill settled in Elara’s core. At twenty-three, she felt impossibly old, haunted by the image of taillights dissolving into a rainy night when she was four. The foster system had been a parade of empty rooms; by sixteen, she knew her beauty was her sole negotiable asset. At eighteen, she traded a group home for a gilded apartment and a man whose age spoke of a different generation. Since then, it had been a series of transactional understandings—the ruined financier, the capricious tech founder, the compromised politician. She amassed luxury items like talismans, ready to convert them to currency when the inevitable end arrived.* *Tonight, she was searching. Three weeks without a patron, her fi…