GARETH STONE – författare

Silas Mercer has spent months beneath the shadow of his wife's mysterious suicide. Rumors follow him, a local journalist has questioned why no one investigated the death, and Silas has learned to survive by burying himself in work.Then Celia Vale walks into his company.Beautiful, intelligent, and frightened of a man she claims never to have met, Celia knows details about Silas that should be impossible to know. She insists she has only one purpose: to prove Silas is innocent—and to show him that he is still capable of being loved.What begins as suspicion becomes attraction. Attraction becomes obsession. Soon Celia is living with Silas, drawing him into a world of parties, pleasure, drugs, and reckless nights while his empire begins to crumble.But Silas is not as broken as he appears.When Celia finds herself behind prison walls, memories of meaningless moments return with terrifying clarity. The packages. The parties. The drugs. The questions. The choices she thought were her own.Piece by piece, she begins to wonder whether she was ever controlling the game.And the truth about who she really is—and what Silas knew before she entered his life—may be the dangerous secret of all.

At Morrow & Pike, a London advertising agency where nobody ever seems to mean exactly what they say, Matilda Quill has become remarkably good at reading everyone—except Julian March.Julian is calm, observant, and frustratingly difficult to understand. As the agency works on a dating campaign about noticing what is already in front of you, Matilda finds herself increasingly distracted by the very person she is trying not to notice. Meanwhile, her best friend Bea seems caught in a confusing dynamic with photographer Nate Calder, creating a tangled web of assumptions, glances, and badly timed interruptions.Then the misunderstandings begin to carry real consequences.Strange messages appear. A mysterious location marked B17 raises questions. A high-profile production takes an unexpected turn, and what first looks like ordinary workplace chaos begins to feel far more deliberate. As Matilda, Julian, Bea, and Nate are drawn deeper into the mystery, they must work out who they can trust—and what everyone has been hiding.Funny, romantic, and quietly suspenseful, WHAT YOU THOUGHT I MEANT is a story about missed signals, mistaken assumptions, unexpected danger, and the complicated truth waiting beneath the things people say.Sometimes the person you think is looking at someone else is actually looking at you.