Gilded Secret

She found a coded map hidden beneath a forged painting. He's the only man who can help her follow it — and the only one who might be using her to do it.Elite art appraiser Eleanor Hale has spent eleven years rebuilding a reputation destroyed by someone else's fraud. When a routine authentication reveals a hidden cartographic pattern leading to a legendary art collection lost during the war, she expects vindication. Instead, she gets Damian Voss — a ruthless billionaire collector who blackmails her into helping him find it first.Forced to pose as newlyweds on a high-stakes journey across Europe's most gilded galleries and best-kept secrets, Eleanor and Damian must stay one step ahead of a black-market hunter who's already killed to keep the collection's location buried. As the lies they tell to survive start to feel less like performance and more like truth, Eleanor has to decide: is Damian protecting her, or simply protecting his investment until she's no longer useful?A slow-burn romantic suspense novel of quiet luxury, hidden danger, and a love neither of them saw coming.Clean romantic suspense — no explicit content. Intense tension, danger, and a hard-earned happy ending.