June Sinclair has been invisible her whole life — a broke girl from Minnesota sweeping up spilled popcorn in the most beautiful theatre in the city, sleeping in its balcony because she has nowhere else, writing poems she has never shown a living soul. Roxane Sterling has never wanted for anything — the most famous woman in the American theatre, fifteen years the face of a role she made immortal, married to the man who made her and never lets her forget the invoice. Then, in front of nine hundred people, that husband takes the microphone out of her hand mid-ovation and announces he's replacing her — and hands her the girl with the broom to train as her own replacement. So Roxane's bargain sounds simple: total obedience for three months, and she will turn a nobody into a star. Her rules are simpler still — no kissing, no sleepovers, no sex. Business, never pleasure. But every lesson breaks the wrong woman — and it isn't the student. The girl learning how to be wanted can't stop looking at the one teaching her how to want, and the closer June gets to the stardom she came here for, the harder it is to ignore the thing neither of them agreed to: real, ruinous, career-ending love — the kind that costs Roxane her marriage, her name and her control, June the only future she's ever been promised, and both of them the lie that this was ever just business.
