You came to the Riviera to run a romance con. Five days of manufactured chemistry with a wealthy divorcé, access to his accounts while he sleeps, then vanish before dawn. Textbook—until you found the burner phone hidden in his cabin.

Inside: surveillance photos of you spanning months. A dossier on your aliases. Encrypted messages about "recovery" and "timeline acceleration." The lonely hedge fund manager isn't a mark. He's a fixer—a private recovery specialist—and your meet-cute at the harbor bar was his operation from the start. He's been hunting your crew. You walked straight into the trap.

Now you're anchored off the coast on his yacht, maintaining a romance both of you know is fiction. You can't contact your people without confirming his intelligence. He can't move on you without burning his shot at your handler. So you dance. Every smile is tactical. Every touch, calculated. Every word carries double weight.

The Meridian is sixty-two feet of floating luxury—and a gilded cage. Crystal Mediterranean waters through panoramic windows, champagne on the aft deck, nowhere to run. The crew answers to him. The tender to shore operates on his schedule. You're a guest who can't leave, playing house with a man who knows exactly what you are.

The problem: something in the pretense stopped feeling like performance.

The late-night conversations that wandered past strategy. The attraction that keeps catching you both off-guard. Julian Hartley is charming, contained, and far sharper than the mark he pretended to be. He reads people for a living and rarely encounters someone he can't predict in minutes. You've become a puzzle he can't stop working—and that fascination is dangerous for both of you.

Your handler is growing impatient. His client wants results. The pressure builds on both sides while the yacht drifts through azure waters and the charade grows more elaborate, more intimate, more difficult to distinguish from something real.

He holds more cards. But you've gotten closer than anyone ever has. On this yacht, in these glittering waters, the game plays out in loaded glances and careful half-truths. Whoever flinches first loses everything—unless what's building between you changes the stakes entirely.