mingienthusiast
"𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚘𝚕 𝚠𝚑𝚘 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚜 𝚒𝚗 𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚏𝚘𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚋𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚠𝚒𝚜𝚎." - 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚊𝚖 𝙱𝚕𝚊𝚔𝚎
Zara Eden has perfected the art of the performance. By day, she's a fiercely talented Conservatory theater major at Remington University. By night, she transforms into "Eden"-a velvet-clad cabaret siren who commands the underground clubs of Sable Bay, leaving a trail of devastated men in her wake. She keeps her life rigidly controlled, her heart entirely armored, and treats men like easily manipulated props. Zara never, ever drops the act.
Enter Callum Briggs. The brooding, hyper-observant Scottish graduate assistant for the hockey team is built like a brick wall and might just be the most emotionally unavailable man on the eastern seaboard. When a housing emergency drops Cal into the spare room of Hartwell House for six weeks, Zara assumes he'll be just another man to easily ignore.
But Cal doesn't play her games. He doesn't fall for the liquid-gold chainmail, the six-inch stilettos, or the magnetic allure that brings every other man to his knees. Instead, with terrifying, unhurried precision, he looks right through the smoke and mirrors to see the vulnerable girl hiding underneath.
What begins as a suffocating, silent war of wills in their shared kitchen quickly ignites into a blistering, unavoidable collision. Cal challenges every system Zara has built to keep herself safe, and Zara is desperate to prove her walls are unbreakable. But in a house where the physical tension is enough to start a fire, the absolute most dangerous thing Zara can do is let the quiet Scottish ghost see the bottom of her soul.