Eighty-Two Steps to You

Two hours before her best friend's name lit up her fiancé's phone, Élodie Moreau was standing on a fitting platform in a wedding dress, promising a dressmaker cake. By ten that night she is in a stranger's flat in Paris with her heart in pieces, and a man called Gabriel who asks for nothing and gives her one perfect night. In the morning she leaves before he wakes.

Two years later she has a fifteen-month-old son with dark curls and a crescent birthmark behind his ear, a fourth-floor flat with eighty-two steps, an old silver bracelet, and a tin full of stones that her child will not let her throw away. She also has a job offer from Delacroix, the one company she has never dared to walk past. And the man who runs it is the stranger from that night.

Gabriel Delacroix, a retired racing driver turned CEO, lives by a rule that has kept him from loving anyone since the day his best friend died. Élodie has a secret she cannot say and a heart she has sworn not to hand over twice. But the heart does not keep rules on a rooftop at midnight, in a print room after hours, or at a hospital bed. Then an old enemy comes for Gabriel's family, the company, and the child he does not yet know is his.