Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
In Cruel Love, Bratva billionaire Anton Almazov decides to teach young paralegal Daisy Fletcher a lesson. There’s nothing he despises more than dishonesty, and he’s ruthless in his desire to punish and claim her in equal measure. By the time he realizes Daisy is not what he thought she was…it’s too late. He’s already destroyed her, heart, body, and soul.
In Close Enough to Kiss, Mia Robertson has decided she’s waited long enough. Since she was sixteen, she’s been in love with her billionaire guardian Alexei Almazov, and she doesn’t care if he also happens to be the most dangerous man in Monaco. But just when she dreams of forever…Alexei walks away and acts like that one stolen kiss between them never happened.
Note: Both books are standalone romances previously published under my pen name Martha Ruthie
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter 1
DAISY
The coffee is on my blouse before I make it through the doors.
Not a tasteful splash. Not something I can dab at with a napkin and pretend never happened. A full, committed spill, the lid popping clean off my travel mug as I trip on the marble step outside Keyes, Inc., and now there’s a river of medium-roast running from my collarbone to my waistband, and the glass doors are several feet away, and through them I can see women in silk and heels crossing a lobby that costs more than my parents’ house.
I'm seven minutes late on my second day of work.
The doors are heavy. They swing inward on some kind of hydraulic system that makes them feel like they’re judging you, and inside, the lobby of Keyes, Inc. smells like gardenia and money. White marble floors. Recessed lighting that turns everyone’s skin golden. A reception desk made of something dark and polished that might be ebony or might be the physical manifestation of my inadequacy.
“Fletch!”
Aunt Kaye crosses the lobby like she was born on marble. Her heels make no sound. Her hair is pinned in something architectural, blonde and immaculate, and her suit is the colour of graphite, and she is smiling at me with the specific warmth of a woman who once let me eat frosting straight from the can at Thanksgiving and now signs paycheques with a title under her name.
“Let me see.” She takes my shoulders, turns me, assesses the coffee damage. Her mouth presses together. “We’ll fix it. Come on.”
She steers me past the reception desk, past three women who track our movement with the polished disinterest of cats evaluating a mouse, and into a washroom that has actual hand towels. Cloth ones. In a dispenser.
“Dab, don’t rub,” Kaye tells me, handing me a towel. “The blouse is a loss, but the jacket will cover it. You brought the navy jacket?”
“It’s at my desk.”
“Good girl.” She leans against the counter and crosses her arms. In the washroom mirror, we are two versions of the same gene pool: her jaw, my jaw. Her blue eyes, my blue eyes. But hers come with fifteen years of Monaco and whatever it is that turns a woman from Boise into someone who moves through marble lobbies without making a sound. “How was the apartment last night? Did you find the grocery store I mentioned?”
“Found it. Bought pasta. Burned the pasta.”
She laughs. It’s a real one, head back and teeth showing, and for a second she’s just Aunt Kaye again, the one who drove me to the airport in Boise with the windows down and Promise me you’ll call every Sunday on her lips.
“You’ll find your feet,” she tells me. “Everyone does. The first week is survival. After that, it’s instinct.”
I nod. I dab. The coffee stain isn’t coming out.
KEYES, INC. OCCUPIES the top four floors of a building on Avenue de Grande Bretagne, and everything about it is designed to make you feel like you’ve wandered into someone else’s life. The conference rooms have glass walls. The partners’ offices have views of the harbour. There are fresh flowers on every surfaceand the women who carry files down the corridor do it like other people carry champagne flutes: with their wrists turned out, fingers long, as if the file itself is an accessory.
I carry mine pressed against my chest like a shield.
Blythe finds me at ten-fifteen.
She’s the other new paralegal. Or not new, exactly. She’s been here less than a year. But she’s the one Kaye assigned to “show me the ropes,” which so far has meant a tour of the copier room, a list of partners’ names I will never remember, and a single, devastating sentence delivered over the copier while it hummed: “The dress code is technically business professional, but everyone here is auditioning for something.”
Today she’s wearing a pencil skirt and a blouse that probably cost what I pay in rent. Her dark hair is blown out straight and her eyeliner could cut glass.
“You have coffee on your—”
“I know.”
“Jacket.”
“Wearing it.”
She tips her chin toward my desk. “Kaye wants the Marchetti files colour-tabbed by end of day. Red for litigation, blue for compliance, green for correspondence. You know how to tab?”
I pull open my desk drawer. Inside: a bag of adhesive tabs I brought from Idaho, sorted by colour, each strip pre-cut to the same length. Blythe bends down. Her eyebrows go up.
“You brought your own tabs.”
“The ones in the supply room are too wide.”
Something crosses her face. Not amusement, not quite. Something closer to recalibration. She straightens. “End of day,” she repeats, and turns on one impossible heel and is gone.
BY THURSDAY I HAVE a system.
Tabs: red litigation, blue compliance, green correspondence, yellow for anything that doesn’t fit the first three categories but feels important. I’ve added sub-tabs: small white ones that flag pages with signatures, dates, or dollar amounts. Every file on my desk is squared, spines aligned, a colour-coded map of someone’s legal life that I can navigate in the dark.