He told her not to fall in love with him.
She should have read the fine print.
Holly Carter walks into a black-tie gala with forty dollars, a midnight bankruptcy deadline, and a product sample standing in for a dress. She walks out with something considerably more dangerous: a thirty-day arrangement with Derek Sterling — arms dealer, empire builder, and the most controlled man she has ever met — who has offered to fund her late mother's struggling intimacy products company in exchange for one simple rule.
Don't fall in love with him.
Holly has no intention of breaking it. She is a practical woman. She knows exactly what she is doing.
She is wrong about this.
Derek Sterling has been running an empire alone since he was nineteen years old. He does not make impulsive decisions. He does not require anyone's help. He does not change the water in other people's flower vases.
Until Holly Carter walks across a room full of people going the other direction — straight toward a loaded gun, straight toward him — and something shifts that he has no contract for.
So he writes one.
Thirty days. One manor house. Two people who are very bad at being honest about what they want — and very good at everything else.
What follows is a slow burn of closed elevator doors and breathing exercises, warehouse dinners and stolen patent files, anonymous threats and a grandmother who arrives without announcing herself and sees everything immediately. Of a man who has spent twenty years keeping people at a careful distance, and a woman who walks toward difficult things on principle, and the thirty mornings between them in which choosing becomes habit becomes something neither of them has a word for yet.
Play With Fire, Mr. Sterling is an enemies-to-lovers billionaire romance with a slow burn that earns every degree of heat — a story about a woman who builds things, a man who protects them, and the bet neither of them was supposed to win.
Perfect for readers who love: billionaire romance with genuine emotional depth, slow-burn enemies-to-lovers tension, a heroine who is competent, funny, and completely unwilling to be managed, a hero whose walls come down in increments and make noise when they fall, dark atmospheric settings with a beating heart underneath, and happily ever afters that are earned, not given.
"You're the one who said don't fall in love with you, Mr. Sterling. You should have been more specific."
