Falling for the Billionaire

The first time Bonita Sharp meets Cliff Brooklyn, she is mid-storm-out of his office, heels skidding on imported marble, braced for the hardest fall of her life. It never comes. Her new boss catches her against his chest, and for one long second the most feared man in the city just holds her, dark eyes full of secrets she has no business wanting to unlock.

She came to Brooklyn Tower with nothing. One thin white dress rescued for the occasion, a bus pass, an apartment with chipping paint, and a desperate need for a steady paycheck. The interview is a massacre; candidates leave the top floor in tears. Bonita is the only one who yells back at him on her way out the door.

It is, apparently, exactly what he has been waiting for.

Cliff is arrogant, impossible, used to a world that flinches when he snaps his fingers. He hands her the secretary job and a contract full of rules, then spends every working hour breaking them himself. He orders her lunch. He corners her in elevators, close enough that she catches the expensive warmth of his cologne and forgets what she was mad about. He grows jealous over nothing and dares her to call him on it. She gives as good as she gets, until the night the teasing finally snaps, and his mouth finds hers, and neither of them pretends again that this is about coffee and calendars. He whispers that he has wanted her far too long, and she believes him.

But Bonita is learning that the Brooklyn family eats its own. Cliff's father Fredrick smiles with perfect warmth and keeps syringes in a briefcase. There are locked floors, guarded gates, men who watch her too closely. When Bonita gets taken, Cliff tears through his own bloodline to reach her, and the building comes down behind him in fire and smoke. Everyone tells her the same thing: no one could have survived that explosion.

She spends her days pretending to believe it too.

Then a stranger with her boss's eyes pulls up beside her, offering her a job and a ride home, and he looks straight through her like they have never met. She studies his face, her heart hammering, and gives him a smirk she has been saving.

"I'm Bonita Sharp. Try remembering that name, Cliff."

And there is Charles, the one man who stayed when everything else burned, steady and patient and done with waiting in the wings. Two men. One buried past. A family that will do anything to keep the truth underground.

Can a girl who owns nothing hold her own against a dynasty that owns everything? Will Cliff remember what they were before the fire took it from them both? And if his memories never come back, is a love he cannot recall worth fighting a war to keep?

She fell first. He fell harder. Now the only way out is through everything they were.