Dirty Rich

My name is Mia Santos, and I know what it means to have nothing. I know the weight of unpaid rent sitting on your chest at 2am. I know the embarrassment of counting coins at a grocery store while people stare. I know what it feels like to have big dreams trapped inside a life too small to hold them. New York City promised me everything. It gave me a dingy apartment in the Bronx, a waitressing job that barely kept the lights on, and a sketchbook full of paintings nobody wanted to buy. I wasn’t supposed to meet him. Damien Cole, the man whose name is carved into half the skyline of this city. Cold. Powerful. Untouchable. The kind of man who doesn’t notice women like me. The kind of man who buys and sells entire worlds before breakfast. But he noticed me. One desperate night. One moment of humiliation I would have given anything to erase. And there he was standing between me and the worst night of my life, like the city itself had sent him. He said he wanted to help. I should have walked away. I didn’t. Because there is something beneath that ice-cold exterior that pulls at me like gravity. Something in the way he looks at me like I am both a puzzle he cannot solve and the only answer he has ever wanted. He is everything I was taught to distrust. Arrogant. Controlling. Dangerously generous. And I am falling. They say money changes everything. But Damien Cole isn’t just changing my circumstances, he is changing me. Pulling me into a world of penthouses and silk sheets and hungry midnight glances that make me forget I ever knew what it meant to be cold.