Degrees of Burn

Riva Montes has always believed in control-of her hands, her hours, her heart. In the operating room, precision saves lives. Beyond it, discipline keeps her safe from the ache of wanting more than the world will allow.

Then comes Trevor Callister. Brilliant, unreadable, and impossibly present in the spaces she least expects him, he is not a man she can name, much less claim. What exists between them has no definition-only a pull that sharpens in silence, a hunger that deepens each time she tries to turn away.

It begins like the sting of heat against skin. Barely there, almost ignorable. But fire doesn't arrive all at once. It climbs, it spreads, it devours-inch by inch, degree by degree-until what's left is not the person who first touched the flame, but the one remade in its ruin.

This is the story of what it costs to love without permission, and what it means to burn for someone who was never yours to keep.