Dust & Gold

By: Annika Stone

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

She guards the past. He buys the future. Their contract says one year.

Sylvia Mercer has seventy-two hours to save her family's crumbling archive before the bank padlocks the doors and auctions a century of history to the highest bidder. She's spent ten years fighting developers, dodging creditors, and cataloging a collection worth more than money can measure.

Then Alistair Crowe walks through her door.

He's called the Wolf of State Street—a ruthless corporate fixer who tears companies apart and rebuilds them for profit. He's cold, calculating, and worth more than she'll ever owe. And he just bought her debt.

His terms are non-negotiable: He'll save her archive, endow a preservation trust, and make her financial problems disappear. In exchange, she becomes Mrs. Crowe for one year. A strategic marriage to secure his board's vote. Public appearances. Penthouse living. A performance, nothing more.

But Alistair isn't just acquiring an image. He's hunting for something hidden in her archive—a ledger that could expose the man who destroyed his father twenty years ago. And Sylvia isn't just a convenient bride. She's the only person who can find it.

As the contract tightens around them, the lines between transaction and trust begin to blur. Every accidental touch. Every 3 AM confession. Every moment he turns up the thermostat because she's shivering.

She was supposed to be an asset. He was supposed to be temporary.

Neither of them planned on this.

Dust & Gold is a slow-burn contemporary romance with literary prose, a corporate drama subplot, and sensory fade-to-black intimacy. Perfect for readers who love Ali Hazelwood's workplace tension, Tessa Bailey's grumpy heroes, and books that smell like lemon oil and old vanilla.