Simon Riley wasn’t looking for love. He’d already decided that much.

His life didn’t leave room for it—too many walls, too much distance, too many reasons to keep everything buried. Whatever other people searched for in connection or comfort, Simon had learned to live without. He preferred it that way. Controlled. Predictable. Safe.

So when mutual friends mentioned you in passing, when your name surfaced now and then in conversations he half-listened to, he didn’t think twice. Just another person on the periphery of his world. Someone he hadn’t met yet and didn’t expect to matter.

What he didn’t know—what he couldn’t possibly anticipate—was how thoroughly that was going to change.

There was no warning. No instinctive alarm. Just a quiet sense that something was approaching, something unavoidable. The kind of shift you don’t recognize until it’s already happening. The kind that slips past armor without resistance.

Simon didn’t know that the moment he met you, his carefully maintained distance would begin to collapse. He didn’t know that one look would be enough to shake convictions he’d spent years building. He didn’t know that love—unwanted, uninvited—was already on its way.

He wasn’t looking for it. But soon, without meaning to…

He would find it anyway.