Thai-American executive Nira Vong doesn't take time off. She takes problems apart.
When her board ships her to a remote Highland stonehouse for a forty-eight-hour leadership isolation brief, she treats the whole thing as an inconvenience with better fog. No signal. No assistant. One locked door. And a kilted Scottish contractor who watches the walls as if the walls might answer back.
Declan MacLeod is paid to keep guests inside the weather. He's not paid to explain the howls on the hill or the cold that moves through the old range like a second tenant. He reads the house within minutes of arrival. Then he makes a choice. Wolves would send Nira straight back to her notebook. Ghosts might pull her closer.
Sealed in frost and peat smoke, a ruthless workaholic and a rugged bad boy start a careful game of comfort and control. She offers sharp practicality and body heat she absolutely refuses to call kindness. He offers fear that looks real enough to touch. Every creak becomes a small argument. Every shared inch of firelight becomes a risk neither of them accounted for.
Outside, a secretive agency is running a manufactured panic engineered to push strangers into survival and heat. Inside, attraction tips from irritation into something considerably hungrier. Nira won't be managed. Declan won't become anyone's project. When the trap shows its wires, they have to decide if they're still running the scene or writing something new entirely.
In a locked house with no honest warmth but each other, how long can two people pretend the dark is the only thing pulling them together?
***
Somewhere behind unmarked borders, a shadowy global facility pulls strings most people never know exist. Five couples, five secluded locations engineered for maximum fear and minimum escape. The Ministry designed every detail.
What it didn't account for: uncontrollable, blistering heat between people who are terrified and trapped together.
Fake horrors become real temptation. Diverse heroes and heroines outsmart unseen captors while navigating something considerably more difficult than survival protocols. They thought they understood the rules coming in.
They were wrong about that too.
The Global Passion Ministry. Read the books. Break the rules. Feel the heat.
