Beautiful Fixation

After three years in the United States, Lila Rao is exhausted from surviving.

A failed relationship, a year of rejected job applications, mounting debt, and months of couch-hopping have left her desperate for stability. When she finally lands a software engineering job in Washington, D.C., she thinks the worst is behind her. The only problem is finding somewhere she can actually afford to live.

Then a chance conversation with a well-connected stranger leads her to an impossibly affordable guest suite inside one of the city's most exclusive apartment buildings.

For the first time in years, Lila has something that feels like her own.

Until the apartment's owner comes home.

Alexander Prescott Whitmore is not the man Lila expected.

For more than a decade, he has lived far away.

Years of classified military operations have taught him that trust is dangerous, kindness can be manufactured, and the person smiling beside you may be waiting for the right moment to kill you.

So when Alexander returns unexpectedly and discovers a stranger living inside his home, instinct takes over.

By the time he realizes Lila is exactly who she claims to be, the damage is already done.

She wants nothing to do with him.

But she doesn't succeed.

Because the more Alexander learns about the woman who somehow wandered into the only place he considered untouchable, the harder it becomes to look away.

Her warmth unsettles him.

Her stubbornness challenges him.

Her fear of him infuriates something inside him he cannot name.

And when simple curiosity becomes attention, attention becomes attachment, and attachment becomes something darker, Alexander begins to realize that after years of learning how to survive without needing anyone, Lila Rao may have become the one person he cannot let go.

What begins as a terrible mistake turns into an obsession neither of them is prepared for.

Because Alexander Whitmore does not fall in love gently.

He fixates.