The Crane house had forty-one rooms, and by the end of my first hour in it I'd decided that not one of them knew how to be lived in.
I'd counted them off the listing my mother left open on her phone — forty-one rooms, eleven baths, nine acres, west of nothing and reachable by no bus I could find. She'd read it to me twice in the car like it was a poem, like the numbers might soften the part where we were moving into a stranger's home because we couldn't afford to keep our own.
Three hundred miles is a long time to be angry in a car, and I'd made the anger last the whole way. We'd left before the sun came up, everything we owned folded into boxes and contractor bags in the back of a borrowed van and stacked on the seats of my mother's dying sedan, and I'd watched our life get small in the side mirror — the apartment with the water stain shaped like a country nobody had named, the lot, the street, the town that had never once done us a favor — until it was a smear and then a feeling and then nothing at all, just road, and the radio finding a station and losing it and finding another one to lose. My mother hummed along to a song that kept cutting out. I didn't. I'd decided, somewhere around the second hour, that humming was a thing you did when you'd given up, and I wasn't ready to give up yet, so I sat with my forehead against the cold window and practiced being somewhere else.
"You'll have your own room," she'd said, three hundred miles ago, merging onto a highway that emptied the farther we drove. "A real one. Not the pull-out."
"I had a real one."
"Elle."
"I'm just saying the pull-out had a name. It was my room. It had a door."
She didn't answer that, and I let the quiet sit there between us and be heavy, because I was eighteen and I wanted it to be heavy, I wanted her to carry some of what I was carrying. It wasn't fair. I knew it wasn't fair even then. She'd lost more than I had — the kitchen she'd built with her own two hands, the back that gave out under the weight of building it, the husband who'd left so long ago he was barely even a wound anymore, just a scar I couldn't remember getting. She'd lost all of it and she was still humming. That was the part I couldn't forgive, that morning. That she could still hum.
She'd let it go, the way she let most things go that year, with both hands on the wheel and her jaw set against the windshield. I watched the houses get bigger and farther apart until they stopped pretending to be houses at all and started being walls — long pale walls with gates in them, hiding whatever was worth that much fencing. You can read a place by its walls. Where I'm from, the walls are chain-link and they're there to keep what little you have from walking off in the night. Out here the walls were stone and ivy and they ran for a quarter mile at a stretch, and they weren't keeping things in. They were keeping the rest of the world out. Keeping us out, specifically, the kind of people who came in vans, and the wall didn't know yet that it had failed, that it was about to let one of us all the way inside.
The Crane gate had a camera and a keypad and a man in a booth who didn't look up from his phone when my mother gave her name. He made her say it twice. Mercer. Diane Mercer, I'm the new — I'm starting today, for Mr. Crane. He looked at a clipboard like our entire existence was a line item he had to confirm, and maybe it was, and the gate rolled back on a motor so smooth it didn't make a sound, and that silence told me more about money than anything I'd seen yet. Where I'm from, everything that opens makes a noise. The drive past the booth was longer than the street I grew up on — I clocked it, the way I clock everything, a long pale ribbon of asphalt with grass on both sides cut so even it looked combed, and then trees that had been planted in a line by someone a hundred years ago who knew he'd never see them tall. The fountain came up on the left, three tiers of stone with a woman at the top pouring water from a jar, except no water came, the jar tipped over a dry basin full of last fall's leaves, and I thought: first thing I've seen here that's broken. I was wrong about that. It wasn't the first. It was just the first one they'd let show.
By the time the house came into view — gray stone, too many windows, a fountain in front that wasn't running — I'd stopped doing the math on what one month of this place cost and started doing the math on how fast I could leave it.
Two hundred and eighty-three days. That was the number that mattered to me. That was how long until I heard back from the only thing I'd ever wanted, the law program I'd applied to with an essay I rewrote eleven times and a recommendation letter from a teacher who told me, gently, that places like that didn't usually take girls like me but that I should apply anyway because you never know, Elizabeth, and you're the most stubborn student I've ever had.
I was going to make her right. This house was a stopover. A place to sleep and save and wait. I told myself that, standing in the gravel with a box of my books against my hip, looking up at all that gray stone. I'd counted the windows on the front face — fourteen, two of them dark in a way the others weren't, curtained from the inside — and I'd decided the house was a thing I could survive the way you survive a long shift, by not letting it become real, by keeping one eye on the clock.
The house looked back at me like it didn't care either way.
* * *
It was a woman named Marisol who let us in, and the first thing she did was apologize for the smell.
There wasn't a smell, not really — or there was, but it was the smell of a house that had been closed up and cleaned too hard, lemon and cold air and underneath it something I couldn't name then and would learn to name later. Grief has a smell. It smells like a room nobody goes into. The Crane house was full of those.
"You're the Mercers," Marisol said, not unkindly, taking in my mother and then me and then the two cars'-worth of our entire lives stacked in the entryway. She was older, tired around the eyes, with a ring of keys at her waist that she touched the way some people touch a cross. "I'm sorry it's like this. I've kept it as best I could, but a house this size — " She stopped. "It needs a person who lives in it. That's why Mr. Crane wanted someone full-time. Someone who's here."
"That's me," my mother said, and put out her hand, and smiled the smile she'd been practicing in the rearview mirror for three hundred miles. "Diane."
I watched her shrink herself into that smile. My mother, who used to run a restaurant kitchen before her back gave out and the restaurant closed and the bills came in the kind of stack you stop opening — my mother making herself small and grateful in a marble hallway, because this job came with a roof and the roof came with my future, and she would have scrubbed every one of those forty-one rooms with a toothbrush to keep it.
Something hot and ugly turned over in my chest. I looked away from it, the way you look away from a bruise.
"This is the main hall," Marisol said, already walking, keys jingling. The hall went up two stories to a ceiling with a painting on it, actual figures in actual clouds, the kind of thing you'd tip your head back to look at in a museum and here it was just the ceiling, just the thing you walked under to get to the next room. A staircase curved up one side, wide enough for four people abreast, with a banister that someone had polished so recently I could smell the wax. Everything gleamed. Everything had been done, and done that morning, and would have to be done again tomorrow, world without end, and I understood for the first time and not the last exactly what my mother had signed us up for. "Mr. Crane's study is through there, but you don't go in unless he asks. He's — " a small pause, the kind that has a whole sentence folded inside it " — he works. A lot. Since."
"Since," my mother repeated, soft.
"Mrs. Crane passed in the spring." Marisol said it to the floor. "Six weeks now. The house has been — " She didn't finish that one either. She just touched her keys and kept walking, and I understood that nobody in this house finished their sentences about the dead woman, that there was a hole in the middle of every room and everyone had learned to walk around it without looking down.
I looked down. I always have. It's the thing that makes me good at the only thing I'm good at — I look at the part everyone's pretending isn't there.
She walked us through it room by room, and that was its own kind of education. A dining room with a table that seated sixteen and a chandelier over it like a frozen explosion, and not one chair pushed out, not one, all of them tucked in dead even, a table set for a family that didn't eat together anymore and maybe never had. A sitting room where half the furniture wore white dust sheets, humped shapes in a dim room with the drapes drawn, so that it looked like a place where things had been put to sleep. A library — an actual library, two floors of books with a ladder on a brass rail — and I felt the want go through me so sharp it was almost funny, all those books nobody was reading, behind glass, in a house where the only person who'd loved anything was dead. A room with a piano in it, the lid down, a cloth over the bench. A room I couldn't find a use for at all, just chairs arranged around a cold fireplace, a room whose entire job was to be a room. Each one another way of saying the same thing the listing had said. Forty-one rooms. Eleven baths. And in every single one of them, my resentment found a new corner to set up in, because every gleaming useless inch of it was a thing this family had and would never notice having, and three hundred miles back there was a girl who'd cried when she had to leave a pull-out couch because at least the couch had been hers.
And the whole time, my mother got smaller. I watched her do it. She nodded at everything Marisol said and asked the right soft questions and when we passed a side table with a vase pushed too near the edge she set it right without breaking stride, automatic, the way you'd straighten a thing in your own home, and Marisol didn't notice but I did. My mother knew how to move through a house like this. I didn't think about it then — I had too much anger taking up the room where thinking goes — but some back part of me filed it, the ease of it, the way her hand knew where the vase wanted to be. I'd think about it later. I'd think about a lot of things later. That night I just thought she looked like a woman folding herself to fit through a door that was too small, and I hated the door for making her do it.
The dead woman was everywhere. Not in any way you could point to. The house had been scoured of her, every surface wiped clean, and that was how I knew — you only clean like that around an absence. There were lighter rectangles on the walls where photographs used to hang. A wing of the house upstairs that Marisol gestured at and walked us past without opening, the family's rooms, her voice dropping the way voices drop in churches. And through the tall windows at the back of the hall, past a terrace and a lawn cut to the millimeter, I saw the garden.
It was the only thing in nine acres that wasn't perfect.
Roses — I knew that much, even from there, even half-dead. Somebody had planted them in long careful beds, somebody who'd known what they were doing, and then somebody had stopped. The blooms had gone brown on the stems. The beds had gone to weed at the edges. It was a garden that had been loved and then, very suddenly, not, and it sat there in the middle of all that ruthless green like a held breath. Everything else in nine acres had a person paid to keep it. Somebody mowed that impossible lawn and somebody trimmed those planted trees and somebody, I'd bet, came once a week to skim the leaves off a pool nobody swam in. But not the garden. The garden they'd let die on purpose, or not on purpose — they'd let it die the way you let a phone ring when you can't bear to hear the voice that's calling, because the alternative, going out there with shears and touching the thing she'd touched, was more than anyone left in this house could do.
"Don't mind the garden," Marisol said, following my eyes. "Nobody's seen to it since." She didn't say since what. She didn't have to.
I thought: that was hers. I don't know how I knew. I just knew, the way you know which window in a dark house has someone standing behind it.
* * *
The guest house was at the end of a path, past a pool I couldn't imagine anyone swimming in, and it was — I'll give it this — bigger than the apartment we'd left. Two bedrooms. A kitchen with a window over the sink. A front door that locked, that was ours, that nobody else had a name for.
It had a door. I'd give my mother that one, later, when I wasn't so busy being angry.
That was the trap of it, I'd come to understand. The guest house was nice. It was nicer than anything we'd ever had, and that was exactly the problem, because to be grateful for it I had to first agree to be the kind of person they kept in a guest house at the end of a path behind the pool — close enough to come when called, far enough that you'd never run into us in a hall. They'd built a smaller, prettier version of the big house and put it where the big house wouldn't have to look at it, and my mother walked in and her shoulders came down for the first time all day, and I loved her too much to say any of what I was thinking, which was that a cage with a window over the sink is still the place they put you so you'll be easy to find.
I took the smaller room because the smaller room had the better window, and the better window looked out over the rose garden, and I told myself that didn't mean anything, that I just liked the light. I unpacked my books first. I always unpack my books first — it's how I make a place mine, lining the spines up on whatever shelf is going, the secondhand law textbooks I'd bought with tip money and read the way other girls read magazines, the dictionary that had been my grandmother's, the single battered novel I kept around to remind myself that people once wrote sentences for no reason but that they were beautiful. The shelf in the small room was real wood and it held them like it had been waiting, and I hated how good that felt, lining them up, the only thing in three hundred miles that had come with me unchanged.
By the time I'd finished, the light over the dead garden had gone gold, then gray, then gone.
My mother came to the door of my room around ten, still in her good blouse, a smudge of dust on her cheekbone from a day of making the big cold house ready for a man who wasn't there. She looked at my shelf of books and then at me, and her face did the thing it does, the proud-and-worried thing, the I-did-this-for-you-please-let-it-have-been-worth-it thing.
"There's a list of boxes I left in the kitchen up at the house," she said. "Cleaning things, mostly. Mr. Crane's traveling tomorrow and I want the place right before he's back. I'll get them in the morning."
"I'll get them now." I was already up. I couldn't sleep in that house yet — it was too quiet, the wrong quiet, a quiet with carpet under it. I needed to move. "Give me the key. I'll bring them down so you can start early."
She hesitated. My mother, who'd handed me responsibility like a chore my whole life, hesitated in the door of a borrowed room with a borrowed key in her hand, and I should have read it. I should have read the warning in it. But I was eighteen and angry and certain the world was a thing I could manage if I just kept looking at the part nobody else would.
"It's late," she said. "And the son's — " She stopped. Started over. "Just get the boxes and come straight back. Don't go wandering. It's not our house, Elle. We're guests in it. That matters."
"I know what we are," I said, and I heard how it came out, and I watched it land on her, and I was sorry and didn't say so. I took the key. "Boxes. Straight back. I've got it."
I did not, in fact, have it.
* * *
The main house at night was a different animal.
In the dark it gave up pretending to be a home and became what it actually was — big, and old, and full of rooms that watched you. I let myself in the side door my mother had shown me, off the kitchen, and I didn't turn on the lights because some superstitious part of me didn't want the house to know I was in it. The boxes were where she'd said, stacked by the pantry, labeled in her neat all-caps. I could have grabbed two and gone.
But the garden was right there.
You could see it from the kitchen, through a wall of glass doors that gave onto the terrace, and in the dark the dead roses were just shapes, silver where the moon caught them, and I stood there with a box of someone else's cleaning supplies in my arms and I looked at the part of the house nobody would look at, because that is the whole of who I am, and I thought about a woman I'd never met who'd planted something and then died and left it to go brown in the most beautiful yard I'd ever seen.
That's when the front of the house exploded with light and sound.
A car — fast, too fast, I heard it before I understood it, gravel spraying, an engine that cost more than my mother would make in three years cutting out hard right in front of the house. A door slammed. Then the front door, somewhere through the dark hall, banged open against the wall with a crack that went through the whole place, and a voice — a man's, young, wrecked, too loud for a house this quiet — said something to no one, laughed at it, and started toward the kitchen.
Toward me.
I had a choice, in that second. I'd think about it later, lying awake. I could have set the box down and stepped out the side door and been gone, a shadow he'd never have known was there. That's what a guest does. That's what the help does, and I knew the word for what we were even if my mother couldn't make herself say it.
I didn't move.
I told myself it was because I had a right to be there, an errand, a key in my pocket. But the truth is uglier and simpler than that. The truth is I was tired of stepping out of rooms so that people who'd never worked a day could fall into them. So I stood in the dark kitchen of a house that wasn't mine, holding a box that wasn't mine, and I waited.
He hit the light switch and the kitchen went white and there he was.
* * *
The first thing was that he was beautiful, and I hated him for it before he'd said a word.
I want to be honest about that, because everything that came after has to be built on it. He was beautiful the way the house was beautiful — expensively, effortlessly, in a way that had never had to try and so had never learned to be kind. Dark hair shoved back off his face by a hand that had clearly done it a hundred times that night. A jaw you could've cut yourself on. A white shirt half-untucked and undone at the throat, the sleeves pushed up forearms that had ink on them I couldn't read from across the room. His eyes were the gray of the house, of the stone, and they were wrong — too bright, too loose, swimming a little, the eyes of someone who'd spent the night putting as much distance as he could between himself and his own skull. There was a graze on one knuckle, fresh, and a stain on the white shirt he hadn't noticed or hadn't cared to, and he wore the whole wreck of himself like it was a coat he could take off, like none of it could touch the part of him that mattered, and that — more than the face, more than the shirt that cost my month — was the thing I hated. He'd been handed a body and a name and a house with a painted ceiling, and he was out in the dark every night trying to throw it all off a cliff, and somewhere there was a girl rewriting an essay eleven times for the chance at a tenth of what he was busy wasting.
He stopped when he saw me. Swayed, caught himself on the island, and looked at me the way you'd look at a piece of furniture that had moved on its own.
"Okay," he said. The word came out careful, the way drunk people are careful. "Either you're a very boring kind of hallucination or someone's hidden a girl in my kitchen." He squinted. "Did Theo do this? Is this a Theo thing?"
"I'm not a Theo thing."
"No." He tilted his head. "No, you've got too many clothes on to be one of Theo's things." His gaze went down me and back up, unhurried, a thing rich men did to women like it was weather, and landed on the box in my arms. Something shifted in his face — the loose brightness sharpening into something colder, something that had found its footing. "Huh. You're not lost, are you. You know where the cleaning supplies live." He said it slowly, like he was solving it. "You're staff."
He said staff the way Marisol wouldn't say since. Like a thing you set down gently because it might be ugly.
"I'm bringing my mother boxes," I said. "She works here. We moved in today."
"The new housekeeper." He laughed — not at the words, at some private joke the words had unlocked, a laugh with no floor under it. He pushed off the island and came around it toward the fridge, toward me, not steady, and the closer he got the more I could smell it on him, the night he'd had, smoke and something sweet and underneath it that same closed-room smell the whole house had, like he was just another room she'd died in. "My father hired a family. That's new. He's never let anyone live in before. Must've decided the house was too — " he opened the fridge, stared into its light like it might tell him something, let it close " — quiet."
"Maybe he just wanted it taken care of."
"Maybe." He turned around and looked at me again, and this time it was different, this time he actually looked, and I made myself not look away. "What's your name, new housekeeper's kid?"
"Elle."
"Elle." He tried it like the wine he'd clearly already had too much of. "Just Elle?"
"Elizabeth. To people who've earned the whole thing."
I don't know where it came from. It came from the same place that kept me standing in the kitchen. He blinked — actually blinked, the brightness wavering, like I'd reached out and flicked him on the forehead — and for one second, one single unguarded second before he locked it back down, something looked out at me from behind all that ruin that wasn't cruel at all. Something young, and lost, and so tired it scared me.
Then it was gone, and the gray went flat and mean, and he came the rest of the way to where I stood, close enough now that he had to look down to keep my eyes, and he studied me with a kind of lazy contempt that I think was supposed to make me step back. I didn't step back. I'd cleaned worse than him off worse floors than this.
"Earned it," he repeated, and smiled like I'd said something funny. "That's good. You've been here, what, a day? And you've already got a whole philosophy about earning. Let me guess how this goes. You're the smart one. You read." His eyes flicked to nothing, came back. "You've decided we're all exactly what you think we are, the people behind the wall, and you came up that drive tonight already knowing the whole story, and isn't that restful for you. To have us figured out." He leaned in half an inch. "It must be so much easier than being one of us."
It was a good hit. I'll give him that, across all the months between then and now — it was a good hit, and it landed, because there was just enough truth in it to leave a mark. I'd done exactly that. I'd read the walls and written the family before I'd met a single one of them.
"You're right," I said. "I don't know you." I let that sit a beat. "I just know which rooms in this house get cleaned and which one's got the door nobody opens, and I know there's a garden out there somebody loved to death and then left, and I know you came home at two in the morning so loud the whole house shook, to a house that's already shaking. That's not figuring you out. That's just looking. You should try it sometime. There's a lot in this place nobody's looking at."
The kitchen went quiet for a second. Not the wrong quiet, not yet. Just quiet, the held kind, two people who'd surprised each other.
Then he laughed again, softer, and stepped back, and put the careless coat back on, and I watched him decide to win the only way the night had left him.
"Well, Elizabeth," he said, leaning back against the counter, every inch of him gone careless again, "here's the whole thing, since you've earned it. This is my house. That's my fridge. Those — " he nodded at the box " — are my cleaning supplies, technically, since my father pays for them, since my father pays for everything, including, as of today, you. So why don't you take my supplies down to wherever they've put you, and the next time I come home I'd really love it if my kitchen was empty. I like it empty. I keep it that way for a reason."
The reason was standing behind the glass doors. The reason was brown on the stem. I knew it and he knew I knew it, and that was the thing he couldn't forgive — not that I was staff, not that I was in his kitchen. That I'd been looking at the garden when the lights came on.
"Goodnight," I said.
I picked up a second box, balanced it on the first, and walked past him to the side door. I didn't hurry. That was the only thing I had and I spent all of it on not hurrying. At the door I stopped, because I couldn't help it, because looking at the part nobody will look at is a sickness and I've never been cured of it.
"She planted them herself, didn't she," I said. I didn't turn around. "The roses. That's why no one'll touch them."
Behind me, the kitchen went very quiet. The wrong quiet. The kind with something underneath it.
I let myself out into the dark before he could find an answer, and I carried the boxes down the long path past the pool nobody swam in, and my heart was going like I'd run the whole nine acres, and I told myself it was anger.
Two hundred and eighty-three days. A stopover. A place to sleep and save and wait.
I lay awake in the small room with the better window for a long time that night, and when I finally slept I dreamed of a garden, and a boy standing at the edge of it who couldn't make himself go in.
His name, I'd learn the next morning, was Sebastian.
The people he ran with at night called him Bash.
I'd find out what they meant by that soon enough.
Rebecca H. (verified owner) –
Beautifully written and so tense. I just wanted more open-door scenes, personally. Still recommending it everywhere.
Gemma (verified owner) –
After meets Gossip Girl is the perfect pitch and it delivers. Glittering, ruthless, and so so tense.
Maya (verified owner) –
New favorite. Need the sequel NOW. Stayed up all night. No regrets.
CourtneyReads –
Perfectly paced, perfectly angsty, perfectly addictive. This is going on my comfort reread shelf immediately.
Tessa (verified owner) –
Great start to the series. Took me a few chapters to settle in, then I couldn’t stop. Excited for book two.
Hailey (verified owner) –
The chemistry is off the charts. Every scene in those forty-one rooms crackled. I held my breath through half the book.
Georgia M. (verified owner) –
Loved Elle and Bash. The danger subplot got a touch much for me, but overall a fantastic binge.
Kaitlyn R. (verified owner) –
BookTok did not lie. Phenomenal. Chef’s kiss. Pure chef’s kiss.
Morgan S. (verified owner) –
Really enjoyed this. The world-building is lush. Ending left me a little frustrated (in a good, give-me-the-sequel way).
Esme (verified owner) –
Five stars isn’t enough. Elle and Bash have my whole heart and the cliffhanger has my whole nervous system.
Marisol (verified owner) –
My new comfort read. Reread incoming. The slow burn!! The cliffhanger!! Help.
Faith W. –
Addictive and angsty. Knocked a star only because I guessed part of the secret early — still loved the ride.
Brittany C. (verified owner) –
Emilly Carter never misses. I need more of these two immediately.
Wendy K. (verified owner) –
Obsessed. Absolutely obsessed.
Indie R. (verified owner) –
Hooked from page one. New favorite. Need the sequel NOW.
Bethany (verified owner) –
Gorgeous, tense, addictive. Buy it. New favorite. Need the sequel NOW.
Bre A. (verified owner) –
I need more of these two immediately. Gorgeous, tense, addictive. Buy it.
Sierra (verified owner) –
So good I’m angry the sequel isn’t out. Emilly Carter never misses.
Lila (verified owner) –
Chef’s kiss. Pure chef’s kiss. Could not stop reading. Loved every page.
SmuttyShelfie (verified owner) –
Elle’s grief over her dad and the way it shapes every choice she makes gutted me. So much heart under the glamour.
Bianca M. –
Bash being the only person who looks at her like she’s real? I sobbed. Then I reread it. Then I sobbed again.
Isabella R. (verified owner) –
I need more of these two immediately. The slow burn!! The cliffhanger!! Help.
Mira (verified owner) –
Couldn’t put it down. 10/10. Gorgeous, tense, addictive. Buy it.
Renata (verified owner) –
Bash owns my whole heart. The slow burn!! The cliffhanger!! Help.
Nova –
Decent read. The glamour is fun but I wanted more substance to the danger plot. Hovering between 3 and 4 stars.
Greta (verified owner) –
Pretty good. The romance is tense and the writing is lovely, but I saw the ‘secret’ coming a mile away.
Yasmin –
That ending. THAT ENDING. I need Yours to Lose in my hands yesterday. How am I supposed to function now?
Delia (verified owner) –
This had me kicking my feet and giggling AND clutching my chest in dread. Range. Sheer range.
Erin –
Really loved it — the only reason it’s not five stars is that cliffhanger nearly broke me. I NEED the next one.
Jenna (verified owner) –
Forbidden romance done perfectly. Emilly Carter never misses.
spicebookqueen (verified owner) –
Gorgeous writing and incredible tension. Wanted just a little more time with them at the end, but I’m hooked.
Nadia –
A great read. Bash is wonderfully complicated. The miscommunication trope showed up a touch more than I’d like.
Natalie (verified owner) –
BookTok did not lie. Phenomenal. Stayed up all night. No regrets.
Jordyn (verified owner) –
It was fine — well written, just leaned on the miscommunication trope more than I personally enjoy. Might continue the series.
Rachel G. –
Instant five stars. Wow. Bash owns my whole heart.
Danielle P. (verified owner) –
Stayed up all night. No regrets. So good I’m angry the sequel isn’t out.
Mia T. (verified owner) –
Stayed up all night. No regrets.
Ivy M. (verified owner) –
I need more of these two immediately. Chef’s kiss. Pure chef’s kiss.
Angelica (verified owner) –
My new comfort read. Reread incoming. Chef’s kiss. Pure chef’s kiss.
Carly P. –
I screamed into a pillow at least three times. The forbidden tension is UNREAL. BookTok was right about this one.
Kimora (verified owner) –
Tension, angst, glamour — perfection. Emilly Carter never misses.
Eva R. (verified owner) –
Dual POV done RIGHT. Getting inside Bash’s head while he’s trying to hide that secret added a whole layer of agony. Loved it.
Destiny W. (verified owner) –
The ‘help does not touch what belongs to the family’ rule and then watching them break it slowly? Cinema. Absolute cinema.
BingedItAll (verified owner) –
Obsessed. Absolutely obsessed. Gorgeous, tense, addictive. Buy it.
JuliaReads (verified owner) –
Open door but earned every second of it. The build-up makes the payoff hit ten times harder.
Amanda L. (verified owner) –
Very good! The tension is excellent. Docked one star for the cliffhanger doing me dirty. Pre-ordered Yours to Lose.
Penelope (verified owner) –
Couldn’t put it down. 10/10.
Zoe (verified owner) –
Emilly Carter never misses. Inhaled this. Five stars easily.
Kara –
This is exactly the kind of old-money, slow-burn obsession I live for. The Crane estate basically becomes a character of its own.
Camila (verified owner) –
Stayed up all night. No regrets. My new comfort read. Reread incoming.
Talia –
The slow burn!! The cliffhanger!! Help.
onemorechapter (verified owner) –
I cannot stop thinking about this book. Came back to leave a review and now I just want to start it over.
Ursula B. –
The slow burn nearly killed me in the best way. By the time they finally cracked I was clutching my Kindle like it owed me money.
Ophelia (verified owner) –
I went in expecting a fun billionaire romance and got my whole heart stomped on. The class divide is handled with real teeth.
Leah M. (verified owner) –
A war fought in hallways and a garden full of thorns — the writing is gorgeous and the angst is *delicious*.
Lacey (verified owner) –
My new comfort read. Reread incoming.
Sloane (verified owner) –
Loved the old-money atmosphere and the forbidden angle. Wished the side characters got a bit more depth. Onto the next!
Alexis (verified owner) –
Couldn’t put it down. 10/10. The slow burn!! The cliffhanger!! Help.
Fiona (verified owner) –
If you love Ana Huang you are going to inhale this. Same addictive tension, but the dynasty angle makes it feel fresh.
Elise (verified owner) –
Forbidden romance done perfectly. Stayed up all night. No regrets.
romance_addict_x (verified owner) –
I went in expecting a fun billionaire romance and got my whole heart stomped on. The class divide is handled with real teeth.
Brynn –
Gorgeous, tense, addictive. Buy it.
Orla (verified owner) –
Enjoyed this so much. Just be warned it ENDS ON A CLIFF and the sequel isn’t out yet. Otherwise five stars.
Sarah Whitfield –
Forbidden romance done perfectly.
BookTokMadeMeBuyIt (verified owner) –
Liked it more than I didn’t. Slow start and an abrupt ending, but enough hooks that I’ll probably read book two.
Holly (verified owner) –
Bingeworthy doesn’t even cover it. I started at 9pm thinking I’d read a chapter. Sun came up. Worth it.
Samantha K. –
Just not my thing — too much push-pull and not enough resolution before that cliffhanger. Beautifully written, wrong reader.
Olivia F. (verified owner) –
Inhaled this. Five stars easily. Instant five stars. Wow.
Taylor J. –
Bash owns my whole heart. Instant five stars. Wow.
Diana R. (verified owner) –
Hooked from page one. So good I’m angry the sequel isn’t out.
Vera (verified owner) –
Sebastian Crane, you complicated, dangerous man. I would burn the dynasty down for you too, Elle.
Emily Rhodes (verified owner) –
The slow burn!! The cliffhanger!! Help. Bash owns my whole heart.
Nicole P. (verified owner) –
Could not stop reading. Loved every page.
Selena (verified owner) –
Inhaled this. Five stars easily.
Madison (verified owner) –
Read it twice in one weekend. The world Emilly built is so immersive I didn’t want to leave the estate.
Ximena –
Hooked from page one.
Gabriella –
Devoured it in a day. Could not stop reading. Loved every page.
Reese –
Emilly Carter never misses.
Tara L. (verified owner) –
Bash owns my whole heart.
Jolene –
The slow burn!! The cliffhanger!! Help. Inhaled this. Five stars easily.
Chloe (verified owner) –
Strong opener for the Crane Dynasty. A little predictable in spots but the emotional beats really landed for me.
Valeria (verified owner) –
The push and pull between duty and want had me feral. Emilly writes tension like nobody else in this lane right now.
Ashley D. (verified owner) –
The slow burn!! The cliffhanger!! Help. Could not stop reading. Loved every page.
Patrice (verified owner) –
I devoured this in one sitting and immediately resented every responsibility I had the next day. Elle and Bash absolutely consumed me.
Monique (verified owner) –
Forbidden romance done perfectly. Chef’s kiss. Pure chef’s kiss.
Carmen (verified owner) –
Such a good forbidden romance. The slow burn tested my patience at points but the payoff was worth it.
Noelle –
Sebastian Crane has officially ruined fictional men for me. Grief in a tailored suit — that line lives in my head rent free now.
Kelsey M. (verified owner) –
Chef’s kiss. Pure chef’s kiss. Bash owns my whole heart.
Kayla R. (verified owner) –
Instant five stars. Wow.
Lauren B. (verified owner) –
Bash owns my whole heart. Gorgeous, tense, addictive. Buy it.
Harper (verified owner) –
Solid four stars. The chemistry is great, pacing dipped slightly in the middle, but the last third more than made up for it.
Imogen (verified owner) –
Old money, a deadly secret, a brooding heir, and a girl with a countdown — this hit every single one of my buttons.
Harlow (verified owner) –
So good I’m angry the sequel isn’t out.
Stephanie –
So good I’m angry the sequel isn’t out. Forbidden romance done perfectly.
Yvette (verified owner) –
Devoured it in a day.
Hannah B. (verified owner) –
New favorite. Need the sequel NOW. My new comfort read. Reread incoming.
Kennedy (verified owner) –
I need more of these two immediately.
Maddie L. (verified owner) –
Okay. WOW. The forbidden tension between the housekeeper’s daughter and the heir? I was UNWELL the entire time. Emilly Carter does it again.
KikiReads (verified owner) –
Gorgeous, tense, addictive. Buy it. Tension, angst, glamour — perfection.
Paige H. –
Gorgeous, tense, addictive. Buy it. Emilly Carter never misses.
Veronica (verified owner) –
Obsessed. Absolutely obsessed. So good I’m angry the sequel isn’t out.
Felicity (verified owner) –
BookTok did not lie. Phenomenal.
Jessica M. (verified owner) –
Elle is the kind of heroine I’d actually want to be friends with — careful, sharp, saving every dollar, refusing to be small.
Cassie (verified owner) –
Gorgeous, tense, addictive. Buy it. Inhaled this. Five stars easily.
Priya S. (verified owner) –
Could not stop reading. Loved every page. I need more of these two immediately.
Heather L. (verified owner) –
Inhaled this. Five stars easily. My new comfort read. Reread incoming.
Brooke H. (verified owner) –
Chef’s kiss. Pure chef’s kiss.
ReadsTooMuch (verified owner) –
The villain with his hand around Bash’s throat genuinely scared me. A romance with actual stakes — yes please.
Quinn –
The tension of one roof, one rule, zero restraint — I could not put it down. Pre-ordering the sequel right now.
Whitney (verified owner) –
Tension, angst, glamour — perfection.
Dana –
Good concept and I liked Elle, but the cliffhanger with no sequel out yet left me more annoyed than excited.
Abby K. (verified owner) –
Loved the slow burn and the setting. Wanted a slightly longer ending. Still bingeing the rest the second it drops.
Frankie (verified owner) –
Devoured it in a day. I need more of these two immediately.
Megan T. (verified owner) –
I have read a LOT of forbidden romance and this one stands out. The danger subplot actually raised the stakes instead of feeling tacked on.
BookishBre (verified owner) –
New favorite. Need the sequel NOW.
Liana (verified owner) –
Chef’s kiss. Pure chef’s kiss. Obsessed. Absolutely obsessed.
Una (verified owner) –
BookTok did not lie. Phenomenal. Bash owns my whole heart.