ARC open: The Exit Strategy, a forbidden workplace slow burn you can finish in two hours

Hello. I'm Ayla, and this is the fourth and last book in The Cold Open Series.

Here's the opening, so you can decide quickly whether it's yours.

Greta Bauer has run an institution for nineteen years and can defend every decision she has ever made. Anton Sterling is the outside counsel who turns up to examine her contract archive, asks for eight days, and leaves the first meeting with a case he never opened.

Before he says a word, he notices she moved a chair four inches to manage the room.

She gives him two weeks instead of eight days. There is a board session at the end of it that she cannot move.

Neither of them is ready for what happens when two people trained to read everything accurately turn that attention on each other.

WHAT YOU'RE ACTUALLY SIGNING UP FOR

26,500 words. About two hours. EPUB, instant download, no application to approve.

It's a standalone. It's the series finale, but it's a new couple and it explains itself, so you don't need the first three.

Open door, steamy, never explicit. Written for feeling rather than anatomy. Happily ever after, no cliffhanger, no cheating, no violence.

Dual first person POV. Competent adults, later-in-life, forced collaboration, a lot of restraint.

Content notes: workplace power dynamics, professional betrayal and credit erasure, institutional misconduct, career stress.

THIS IS PROBABLY NOT FOR YOU IF

You want the spice early. There is a long wait before anything happens, and the waiting is deliberate. If a slow burn frustrates you rather than holds you, I would genuinely rather you picked a different ARC than finished mine disappointed.

WHAT I'M ASKING

Read it before 3 November if you can.

A review is completely optional. If you choose to leave one, I only want your honest one, at any star rating. A two star review that tells someone this isn't their kind of slow burn is more useful to me than silence.

Goodreads before release is perfect, and please say you received an advance copy, which Goodreads asks reviewers to disclose. Amazon on or after 3 November if you feel like it.

If you start it and it isn't working for you, you can just stop. You don't owe me a finished book and you won't be dropped from anything.

That's it. Thank you for reading this far, which is already more attention than most things get.

Ayla x