Chase Sterling always felt like furniture. The kind you don't notice, the kind that's easy to shove in a corner and forget. He was used to it: people looked right through him, brushed him off like lint. But it only takes one phone call to erase a lifetime of being overlooked. When his estranged family meets a tragic end, Chase suddenly finds himself in charge of the sprawling Sterling fortune. Turns out, riches aren't the only thing the family left him. There's a curse running through his blood, warping love into something hungry and dangerous, impossible to escape.

Vivian Ashford never set out to blow Chase's life to smithereens. Just one decision (a sharp, ruthless move at graduation) was all it took to set their worlds spinning out of control. While Vivian soaks up the Hollywood limelight and collects red-carpet headlines, Chase slips into his new role as Manhattan's most intimidating heir. But no matter how far they run, something keeps yanking them back together, like a stitch in an old wound that refuses to heal.

The production company forms on a Wednesday in a lawyer's office that is neither Chase's usual legal representation nor mine, a neutral third firm that handles the specific kind of entity formation that creative-financial partnerships require, and we sit across from each other at a conference table and sign documents that turn what has been a cultural presence into a legal structure.


Sterling-Ashford Productions. The name goes on the documents in the specific way of things being made official, and the officialness of it produces something I didn't expect, which is not the romance of two people combining their forces into something greater but the specific satisfaction of two people who have been working adjacent to each other for years deciding to formalize what the adjacency has always contained.


Chapter 233 - "Business Partnership"