She came to India to photograph a dying world. She didn't expect to fall for the woman who ruled it.

Seerat Sinclair has spent her whole life on the wrong side of the lens — too brown for Toronto, too foreign for India, always watching, never quite in the room. She reads people for a living and keeps a camera between herself and everything she's ever wanted. So when her college friend invites her to spend a summer at his family's estate, she says yes for all the usual reasons. A distraction. A project. A beautiful place to disappear and photograph the last of India's fading royals.

She has the whole trip figured out.

Then Meher Grewal walks in, and the entire room rearranges itself around her.

Thirty-eight. Widowed. A farmer's daughter who turned a borrowed royal name into an empire of her own, and the most self-possessed woman Seerat has ever put in a frame. She commands boardrooms in the morning and breaks polo ponies at dawn, untouchable and unreadable and entirely in control — except, somehow, when she looks at Seerat. Because Meher looks at her like she's the only thing in the world worth actually seeing. Like the camera was never necessary. Like the hiding could finally stop.

There's just one problem.

Meher is her best friend's mother.

What begins as riding lessons and stolen glances turns into something neither woman is strong enough to outrun — a slow, aching, forbidden pull that unspools over long dawn rides and longer nights, over secrets kept in the mist and promises made where no one can hear. It's the kind of wanting that could cost Meher everything: the empire she built with her own hands, the family who depend on her, the careful, gilded life she's spent years pretending is enough.

Every rule says walk away. Every instinct says run.

But Meher Grewal has spent her whole life asking permission — from families, from a name, from a world that only ever handed her things she didn't choose. And the one piece of advice she gives Seerat is the one she's never once followed herself:

Don't wait to be given your life. Take it.

Now there's a girl with a camera who's decided to hold her to it.

Some wants can be hidden. Some can be survived. And some walk in wearing heels and dust on their boots and refuse, quietly, to stay quiet.

She was told to never ask permission.

She's about to find out what happens when she stops.

A forbidden, slow-burn sapphic age-gap romance of polo, palaces, and being seen. Steamy, tender, and impossible to put down.