The Color of Cold
Bria Stephens was an artist once. She painted cities at dusk in colors no one else could see — until someone she trusted told her she wasn't good enough. She never picked up a brush again.
Now she's a senior editor at Caelum Press, one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the country. Her colleagues call her the Ice Queen of the slush pile. Authors fear her rejections. No one knows she still sees the world like a canvas — she just stopped letting anyone see her.
Ryan Malcolm wasn't always Ryan Malcolm. He was born Dante Wards, in a neighborhood that tried to bury him. He failed. He lost everything. So he left, changed his name, and rebuilt himself from nothing. Now he's the cold, elusive CEO of Caelum Press — the company he built with his own hands. The only people who know the man beneath the armor are the younger sibling he raised alone, and the anonymous scholarship he funds for kids from his old streets.
When an anonymous manuscript lands on Bria's desk — a story about a young artist who stopped painting, written with details no stranger should know — her carefully constructed walls begin to crack. Someone inside Caelum Press knows her secret. Someone is watching.
At the same time, an inquiry into the Dante Wards Scholarship threatens to expose the past Ryan has spent years burying.
Forced together by the threats circling them both, Bria and Ryan discover what they've been hiding from the world — and from themselves. Two people who built the same walls. Two people who recognize the armor because they wear the same kind.
The world has already written Bria as the villainess. Ryan has been written as a ghost. But the story isn't over yet — and some stories can be rewritten.
The Color of Cold is a slow-burn contemporary romance about art, survival, and what happens when two people who forgot how to feel finally let someone in.