To save his mother’s heart, Lincoln must pretend to love the one man he’s spent a lifetime trying to forget.

At fifty, celebrated classics scholar Lincoln Armstrong has spent decades perfecting his isolation. His life is aworld of order, kept safe by one unbreakable rule. Malik Okonkwo must stay on the far side of the line. As his colleague and his sister’s best friend, Malik is the one man Lincoln has never allowed himself to want. But that boundary shatters during a disastrous Valentine’s Day weekend when Lincoln’s mother, lost to dementia, introduces Malik as Lincoln’s fiancé. To spare her the grief of the truth, Lincoln does the unthinkable. He plays along.

Malik agrees to play the part for one evening. Six hours. No complications. But Malik has never been good at pretending where Lincoln is concerned, and soon, their performance spills into crowded university corridors and shared meals thick with scrutiny. Hands linger too long, decades of intellectual friction spark with a new intimacy, and years of restraint buckle under a proximity neither man can afford. What began as a desperate act of protection shifts into a temptation Malik refuses to retreat from, and Lincoln can no longer ignore.

As a high-profile symposium traps them in the spotlight, the charade demands a price neither expected. For Lincoln, the truth could shatter his family’s fragile peace and the prestige he’s spent his career building. For Malik, continuing the ruse means risking his tenure and his heart on a man who has made an art of walking away. With the weekend closing in, they must decide if the truth is worth the fallout, or if the only thing more painful than the lie is returning to the silence of a life left unclaimed.

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