Clara & Jack · Book 5
Emotional Drama
The Woman from His Novel
He wants her story. She’s already written her last chapter.
He’s hunting for his next bestseller. She’s already put her last day on the calendar.
For nine years, Clara Steinbrecher has kept the front desk of a Munich publishing house running. She color-codes the files, makes coffee for people who never remember her name, and goes home to Innsbruck every Friday, where everyone needs something from her. Inside, she went quiet a long time ago. She has decided she doesn’t want to go on, and she’s planning her goodbye as carefully as any appointment.
Jack Rowland is the house’s star author: charming, ruthless, used to hearing yes. He’s also the man who hurt Clara when she was eighteen, then turned her into a punchline in one of his novels. And still, whenever he calls, she goes.
When Jack demands a secretary for two weeks at his house on Austria’s Lake Wörthersee, his publisher sends Clara. She says yes without asking why. Jack figures out what she’s planning faster than anyone, and he pushes back the only way he knows how: wildflowers cut from a roadside field, a ring twisted from champagne wire, a red-carpet premiere in Cannes, and a wedding the bride finds out about the same morning.
But soon nobody can say who’s staging whom. And Jack, who can turn anyone into a sentence, can’t find a single word.
What happens to a man who holds on to a woman so he can write about her, once he can’t let go?
Bestselling author and his secretary · Second chance with a debt to pay · Surprise wedding · Who’s playing whom? · Happy ending, scars included
🌶️🌶️🌶️ Dark, tender, darkly funny, and no fade to black. A love story that doesn’t sugarcoat a thing and still ends well.
Content note: depression, suicidal thoughts and planning, a parent’s past suicide attempt (flashback), past sexual assault, explicit scenes.