Novellas
The Cotswolds Proposition
Tamsin Devereaux collects men the way she collects art: exquisite, intense, temporary.
No permanence. No keepers. Just brilliant, fleeting installations.
A commission payment from a substantial art sale changes everything. It wasn't spending money, but making it breathe, preserving and growing a fortune, that demands expertise. Her solicitor points her towards Steven Cantioli, the discreet Cotswolds-based wealth manager who shuns city flash for quiet mastery. Tamsin drives down with cool detachment, ready to assess, delegate, depart. The Cotswolds? A backwater of muddy boots, livestock, quaint little cottages and domestic tedium, nothing more.
Steve is not what she expected. Rooted, unflinching, perfectly composed. What begins as portfolio talk drifts into shared silences, fireside whisky, walks where words aren't needed. She considers him—a potential addition to the collection, perhaps the most intriguing yet.
Then the first night: She stays at his Cotswold stone manor. They sleep under the same roof, but in separate rooms. No seduction. No conquest. Just proximity that feels dangerously different. For the first time, her rules bend. The fortress trembles.
And permanence, once unthinkable, starts to whisper like a possibility.
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The Chicken Hunters
In a quiet village where everyone thinks they know the rules, kindness can be more dangerous than cruelty.
The Chicken Hunters is a slow-burn psychological story about restraint, temptation, and the terrible power of assumption. As loneliness, desire, and good intentions collide, a decent man finds himself judged not by what he's done, but by what others are ready to believe. Darkly humane, unsettling, and painfully intimate, this is a story about how easily we hunt monsters — and how rarely we bother to check whether they exist.
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The Service Charge
When Yvette finally walks out on twenty years of domestic servitude, she needs an income. What she finds at an upscale hotel brasserie is something far more dangerous: opportunity.
The hotel is a conveyor belt of travelling executives, conference delegates, and corporate egos—men who expect to be managed, indulged, and smoothed over. Having spent two decades mastering the invisible art of handling a demanding man, Yvette turns the tables. In three-inch heels and crisp silk armour, she steps onto the floor not as prey, but as the predator.
The rules are clinical. Strictly transient. Generous tips in her pocket, and forty-one conquests logged with forensic precision in her midnight-blue notebook. Men who take what they want, give what she demands, and catch early-morning flights before breakfast. No strings. No permanence. A self-imposed service charge levied on male desire.
Until Steven Cantioli walks into her orbit.
Steven doesn't fit the mould. Grounded, observant, and quietly formidable at his Cotswold estate, he isn't checking his watch, playing corporate power games, or rushing to catch an early flight. For the first time, Yvette's carefully calibrated ledger faces an anomaly: a man who doesn't negotiate terms, doesn't demand service, and refuses to remain just another transient entry.
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