When Luck Strikes

Carnelian Brooklyn has her future mapped out to the minute: finish her degree, claw her way up the corporate ladder, and never, ever depend on a man to hand her the life she wants. Her grandmother drilled it into her every single morning: be your own person first, and let no one take care of you.

Then the phone call comes, and the plan burns down overnight.

Her grandmother, her best friend and her loudest believer, is suddenly gone. Carnelian walks away from college with a suitcase and a one-way ticket to Dallas, determined to pack up the house, settle the estate, and hold herself together. Grief can wait; jobs cannot. That is the deal she makes with herself.

The offer that changes everything comes from Blackstone Incorporated, the dynasty that owns half the Dallas skyline. And the man across the interview desk is Edmund Blackstone himself: cold, exacting, impossible to read and unfairly gorgeous. He runs the family empire like a man who has never heard the word no and expects the world to jump. Instead of jumping, Carnelian gives him attitude. To her horror, he likes it.

He hires her on the spot. Then he makes it clear the job is only the beginning. Behind the boardroom doors waits a private world of contracts, rules and control, where Edmund demands everything, and where Carnelian discovers the most dangerous secret of all: the man who seems to own every room he walks into only holds power because she agrees to give it to him.

But wanting Edmund Blackstone is a full-contact sport. There is Jasmine: beautiful, rich, relentless, and convinced that the empire, and its master, already belong to her. She plays dirty and plays to wound. When the heartbreak comes, it comes hard, and Carnelian does the last thing she ever planned. She falls into the arms of Preston, Edmund's younger brother, the magazine-famous golden boy who has spent his whole life competing for everything Edmund has. Preston is summer where Edmund is winter. Preston wants her in daylight, without shame or contracts. So why does her traitor heart still stumble every time Edmund fills a doorway?

Choosing between the brothers was supposed to be the hardest thing she would ever do.

It was not.

Because just when Carnelian and Edmund finally get honest with each other, she walks through her own front door and vanishes. The crew that takes her trades in human lives, and they want a ransom before anyone blinks. The police move like men waiting for something. Edmund does not wait. He calls in the estranged siblings he barely speaks to, straps a pistol back where it belongs, and turns the city inside out, because the woman they stole is the one thing in his hands he never intends to lose.

A billionaire boss romance with a bite: a heroine who refuses to be anyone's prize, a hero who has never been refused anything, and a love that has to outlast exes, rivals, family secrets and strangers in the dark. Carnelian built herself out of her grandmother's dreams. Now she has to decide how much of that self she is willing to risk for a man who would burn his empire down to keep her.

Luck brought them together. Keeping each other will cost everything.