After Hours

Jake Mercer sells the version of Manhattan most people only glimpse in a taxi window at midnight - forty-foot ceilings, private elevators, the view that stops a stranger's breath on the thirty-ninth floor. He's the top-producing broker at KingsTower International, a man who can read a buyer's want before the buyer finds the words for it. What none of his clients know is that Jake Mercer didn't exist before he was twenty-two. Before the tailored suits and the corner office, there was a kid from Corona, Queens, named Mateo, who swore that whoever he built himself into next would never have to apologize for anything again.

Then an anonymous after-hours showing changes everything. No name, no history - just a client who wants the building empty and the lights off. The man who steps off the elevator is unlike anyone Jake has ever sold to: precise, watchful, asking about acoustics and privacy instead of square footage. His name, when he finally gives one, is a single word: Lucas.

Lucas Lin came to Manhattan to buy an apartment his family's fortune can easily absorb - and to disappear, for a handful of hours after dark, from a life that was mapped out for him before he could walk. Heir to a shipping-and-logistics empire spanning Singapore, Hong Kong, and half the globe, he has a mother who loves him fiercely and still expects the mask to stay on, and a father whose idea of security looks a great deal like a merger dressed up as a wedding.

What starts as a showing becomes something neither of them can file away by morning. Jake, who has never let anyone close enough to threaten the life he built, finds himself with nothing to sell and no idea what to say. Lucas, trained since childhood to give nothing away, starts giving Jake small, unbearable amounts of the truth. Around them, the machinery of both their lives keeps turning: Jake's boss is watching the deal that could finally make his promotion inevitable; Lucas's family is watching for the announcement they've already agreed to make.

It would be so much simpler if Lucas were just another client. He isn't. And when the carefully maintained distance between their two worlds finally collapses, both men are forced to negotiate the one thing neither has ever done honestly - deciding what they're willing to lose, and for whom.

After Hours moves between the glittering high-stakes world of Manhattan luxury real estate and the far more dangerous territory of two guarded men falling for each other in the spaces between deals. Sharp, funny, and unapologetically steamy, with banter that cuts as often as it charms and chemistry that builds from a locked elevator to a locked door, this is a love story that refuses to stay discreetly behind closed doors.

They were never supposed to be more than a broker and a client. After hours, everything changes.

After Hours is Book One of The Penthouse Collection, a series of steamy, emotionally driven M/M romances set in the world of luxury real estate - where every property has a story, and every deal is never just business.