Lilith

Some people are most themselves when someone else is reading them.

Lilith Feldman reads men for a living. By day on Sand Hill Road, she watches founders' hands while the partners watch the slides. By night, in hotel suites arranged to her specifications, a litigation partner, a surgeon and a professor pay her to remind them they don't decide. At home there is Mark, who cooks, waits, and has never once asked her for anything.

Then the 2008 crisis puts Adrian Richter across the table from her: a founder whose numbers she should have questioned, and the first man who has ever caught her looking. A new client arrives in a gray suit, carrying a story about a company that was taken from him. It is not his real wound, so she goes looking for it. And Mark, who has quietly been reading her phones, vetting her clients and handling her father for years, makes one decision without her.

Lilith does not choose. She builds. Four chairs. A table set at seven-thirty. Two numbers on the refrigerator that Mark changes before she wakes. A framed page in the hall with a revenue line circled in red.

Lilith is a dark romance in which the power runs the other way. The discomfort is deliberate.

Part of the Sterne Universe. A complete standalone with a happy-for-now ending and no cliffhanger. Intended for adult readers; contains explicit sexual content, including between men.