Architect

She is a fifty-two-year-old white woman who owns a crumbling clifftop manor on the Atlantic coast of Portugal, and he is the twenty-seven-year-old Black engineer twenty-five years her junior who has come to save it, whether she likes his methods or not.Clara has spent her whole life protecting the house her family built three hundred years ago. She knows every hand-hewn limestone block, every tile laid in 1890, every root of the ancient olive tree that clings to the edge of the terrace. She has outlasted storms and a long line of contractors who fled within a week of meeting her. She is calm, sharp and entirely in control. She does not need anyone.Then Nyle arrives.He is young, brilliant and infuriatingly sure of himself. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a faint London edge to his voice and dark eyes that never miss a thing, he walks through her home as if it were an argument he has already won. He touches her stones without asking. He calls her house a ruin. He tells her that her precious south arcade is sliding toward the sea, that the foundations are drinking salt water, and that if she wants the manor to survive another winter, she will have to let him tear up the very things she has spent decades protecting.For three weeks they have fought over coffee, over blueprints, over every centimeter of lime mortar. And for three weeks, the tension between them has been building into something neither of them can calculate.One evening, as the light fades over the Atlantic, he dares her to follow him down the cliffside stair into the old wine cellar to see the damage for herself. In the cool dark beneath the house, with the sea crashing eighty feet below, the arguments finally run out. When he braces his hand beside her head and tells her to say stop, Clara discovers she has no intention of saying anything of the kind.What follows is one long, sleepless night that shakes Clara far more than any storm ever has. Nyle is demanding, possessive and utterly unapologetic, and he wants far more than her signature on a work order. He wants her surrender, and Clara, a woman who has never surrendered anything in her life, is shocked by how badly she wants to give it to him.But desire does not fix a failing foundation. By dawn the heavy machinery will be rolling up the coastal road, and the decision Clara has avoided for weeks can no longer wait. Nyle's plan will save the house, but it could also destroy the olive tree that three generations of her family have tended, the living heart of the estate. She has to decide how much she is willing to sacrifice, and whether the arrogant young man who has turned her world upside down actually understands what this place means to her.As the sun rises over the hills and lights the ocean gold, Clara and Nyle stand together on the old tiled terrace with one last line to draw. It will decide the future of the manor and everything that has grown between them.This is a steamy, standalone older woman, younger man romance with a confident, mature heroine, a dominant and devoted younger hero, sizzling enemies-to-lovers tension and an age gap of twenty-five years. It is set against the sun-drenched cliffs and salt air of the Portuguese coast, where history, heat and the crash of the waves meet. Expect explicit scenes, strong language, a forbidden attraction that refuses to stay buried and a satisfying happy ending.Perfect for readers who love interracial romance, BWWM stories, age gap romance, cougar romance, hot short reads, sensual European settings and heroines who know exactly what they want once they finally admit it.Intended for adult readers only. All characters are consenting adults.