Psychotic Obsession

Aria reflects on love as the force that controls everything—not the sunlit version from movies, but the kind that dismantles identity.

Aria reflects on love as the force that controls everything—not the sunlit version from movies, but the kind that dismantles identity. She describes a man who consumed her body with seduction and false promises while his blue eyes burned into her psyche, who wanted to own her completely, whose charm concealed suffocating control. Physically, he never raised a hand. Mentally, he dismantled her sense of self. His twisted fixations led to devastating consequences he could never acknowledge—unless those consequences touched her. Nothing else mattered to Tobias Mitchell. Nothing but her.

A clinical scientist stumbles over her new assistant's outstretched legs

Aria Miller, a twenty-seven-year-old Scottish clinical scientist, is at a Florida hospital fighting for Ivy Dermot—an eight-year-old with an undiagnosed degenerative illness. After enduring a meeting where older specialists question her youth and qualifications, she exits to find a man blocking the hallway, legs stretched across the floor. She trips over him and crashes face-first onto marble, scattering files and a tampon. He scrambles to help—blue eyes, deep dimples, an apologetic smile. This is Tobias Mitchell, one of two assistants newly assigned to Ivy's case. He introduces himself with a flirtatious comment she should find inappropriate at work. Dr. Blythe, the lead specialist and secretly Tobias's stepfather, soon assigns Tobias directly under Aria. She has no idea what she's stumbled into.

Forbidden mouths meet at work; a no-strings pact follows

Over late-night texts supposedly about Ivy's case files, Aria feels the pull despite herself. She recently left Ewan, her boyfriend of a decade, after discovering a years-old infidelity he'd lied about—a breakup complicated by Jason, Ewan's ten-year-old son she helped raise. Tobias's persistence wears her resistance thin. One afternoon, he traps her between himself and her desk and asks if kissing her would be inappropriate. She answers by pressing her lips to his. He follows her into a bathroom stall, locks the door, and pins her to the wall with his hand on her throat. That night, she texts proposing no-strings sex. He's already booked a room at her hotel. Within minutes, he's at her door. The arrangement is supposed to end when she flies home.

Tobias hires an investigator and drugs her water while she sleeps Behind the dimples operates a mind Aria cannot see. Tobias has paid someone to compile a file on her—birthplace, pill prescription, ex-boyfriend's name, home address, grocery habits. He follows her and Gabriella, her best friend and colleague, to stores and cinemas. After driving the group home from a night out, he slips his prescription sleep medication into everyone's water so he can…