The House Account

Stuart Orrell stole Neil Nadeau’s work, built a celebrated restaurant on it, and decided success made the theft permanent. Neil has six weeks to prove him wrong.

Chef Neil Nadeau returns to Georgetown for the guest residency that could reclaim his name. Six weeks of service, independent clients, and documented recipes will end in a tasting dinner before the patrons who helped turn Stuart into a legend.

Then Neil realizes Stuart never saw the residency as a professional concession.

Stuart doesn’t intend to share the credit. He intends to take Neil back with it.

Years ago, Stuart used Neil’s talent to build his restaurant and Neil’s attachment to keep him working without recognition. When Neil finally left, Stuart treated the separation as an error that time and pressure would eventually correct.

Now Neil is back in Stuart’s kitchen, surrounded by the staff, suppliers, and accounts Stuart controls. Every resource comes with a private demand. Every public acknowledgment can be withheld. Every locked door gives Stuart another chance to enforce the arrangement he believes Neil abandoned without permission.

There is just one complication.

Neil came prepared to expose the thief. He did not come prepared to admit he still wants him.

Neil refuses to surrender authorship, hiring authority, or the independent career he built after leaving Georgetown. Stuart refuses to separate professional ownership from personal possession. As the final dinner moves into Loudoun wine country, the fight over who created the menu becomes a fight over which parts of Neil’s future Stuart can still control.

Except Neil understands leverage better than Stuart remembers.

And the final account will include terms Stuart never expected him to demand.

Six weeks. One stolen legacy. A debt neither man intends to forgive.

By the final course, the world will know which work belongs to Neil. What Neil accepts behind closed doors will remain far more dangerous.

Neither man will leave the table innocent.

The House Account is Book 3 in the Marden House series by Soren Blake. This pitch-black MM dark romance features a chef and restaurant owner, stolen professional credit, a hostile second chance, obsessive possession, workplace coercion, locked-room control, explicit intimacy, dubious consent, and on-page non-consensual sexual content.

This is not a redemption story. Neil reaches a complete, deliberately unequal arrangement by the end, but do not expect apologies, a softened villain, or a traditional happily-ever-after.