He bought a stranger's hands to save his family name.He didn't plan on needing the rest of her.Sloane Maillard restores broken books for a living.Cracked spines. Water-stained pages. Histories everyone else has given up on.She knows how to make ruined things whole.She just can't afford to want the man who hired her.Julian Boudreaux is cold, exacting, and drowning in a scandal that killed his father.The Faucheuse Manuscript ruined his family.Forgery, the experts said. Fake.Now he wants one conservator, one set of hands, one report he can trust—and absolute silence.The problem: silence isn't enough.To save the donation, the funding, and the last shred of his name, Julian needs the world to believe Sloane is more than the woman touching his ruined book.He needs her to be his.So they fake it.Shared rooms. Shared smiles. A grumpy man and the woman who refuses to be intimidated by him, trapped together in a house that smells like dust and old regret.Then, by candlelight, she finds the thing he buried in the binding—and the lie they built starts telling the truth."Tell me you don't feel this," he says, "and I'll let you walk out that door."She can't.But a fake relationship has rules.And a real one has a cost.When the forgery expert closes in and the manuscript gives up its last secret, Sloane has to choose between the safe distance that protects her—and the impossible man who is finally, terrifyingly real.Some bindings hold. Some break. Hers is about to do both.Bought and Bound is a yearning and steamy contemporary romance about a fake relationship, forced proximity, a grumpy-sunshine pairing, a buried secret, and a promise two guarded hearts were never supposed to keep.Perfect for readers who love fake-relationship romance, brooding billionaires, forced proximity, grumpy-sunshine slow burn, and an emotional happily-ever-after. A standalone with a swoon-worthy ending.