He told her exactly what he wanted from her. She said yes anyway.
Iris Chen has spent six years being the smartest person in every room and getting none of the credit. Then Julian Blackwood ? the coldest, richest, most talked-about man in Manhattan ? offers her a hundred thousand dollars for one month of work: find the evidence that will keep him out of federal prison.
There's just one problem. The evidence doesn't exist yet. He needs her to build it.
Julian is being framed for a thirty-million-dollar fraud he didn't commit ? by the one man who ever really knew him. To clear his name, Iris will have to become someone else: a forger of a different kind, a woman with a false identity, a stranger to everyone she loves. She tells herself it's just this once. She tells herself a lot of things.
What she doesn't tell herself ? not for a long time ? is the truth Julian already knows: that she isn't being corrupted. She's finally being seen.
Undue Influence is a story about the difference between being saved and being known, about two people who recognize the worst in each other and choose it anyway. It does not offer redemption. It offers something rarer, and more dangerous: a relationship built entirely on the truth.
They end up together. Whether that counts as a happy ending is the question this book leaves with you.
Undue Influence is a standalone dark romantic suspense novel and the first book in the Beautiful Damage series. Due to intense themes ? psychological manipulation, criminal conspiracy, and a relationship built on genuinely harmful dynamics ? reader discretion is advised.