He can read her pulse on a screen. He has never once had to touch her to do it.

Amber Vale wakes in a place built to look like mercy. Cream walls, cashmere she didn't buy, a wristband that scores how well she behaves. They call it recovery. They call the man who runs it her doctor.

She calls it what it is: a cage with the softest bars money can build.

He knows everything about her. Her sleep, her fear, the count her own body makes when she's afraid. He watches. He conditions. He keeps his hand half an inch from her skin and never closes the distance, because a woman who is never touched is a woman who starts to beg for it.

Amber came in knowing how to survive men who want to own her. She did not come in ready for the one who wants to be wanted back.

She has weeks to take the program apart before it takes her apart first. Every day the half-inch between his hand and her throat gets harder to hate.

The only thing more dangerous than the man who built the program is how badly she's started to want him to mean it.

A slow-burn dark romance where he watches, he conditions, and he does not touch. Not until she decides he will. For readers of Rina Kent, H.D. Carlton, and Penelope Douglas who want the ache drawn out to breaking.

Tropes

• slow burn
• touch-her-not
• morally gray obsession
• forced proximity
• captive heroine
• possessive antihero