Ivy Kensington used to be the daughter of a prestigious family. Then her father was framed and sentenced to twelve years in prison, the family went bankrupt, and Ivy was left scraping by in a run-down apartment, taking small architecture jobs wherever she could find them.
Then Adrian Blackwood, heir to a financial empire, suddenly appears. He buys up all of her family's debt and threatens to make her father's sentence even worse unless Ivy agrees to become the lead architect on his new Manhattan landmark project—and his woman.
What starts as a battle of wills and forced possession slowly turns into something neither of them expected. While secretly planning her revenge, Ivy discovers that Adrian's father, Thomas, was the real man behind her father's downfall. Adrian, meanwhile, finds himself losing control in a different way: the more he tries to own Ivy, the more willing he becomes to turn against his entire family for her.