Page 1 of Hold On to Me
She’s a flight attendant. He’s the billionaire who sat in 1A...until he bought the airline to keep her close.
INCaptivated, Ciana Reyes was twenty-four the first time she poured champagne for Andrei Almazov at forty thousand feet...and spent the entire flight pretending not to notice the scar, the silence, or the way he watched her. She didn’t know then that her airline would be his before the month was out. She didn’t know about the promise he’d made to a dying man through prison glass.
His one duty was to keep her safe. But because she made it impossible for Andrei to keep his word...he did the only thing left. He made sure she saw him with someone else.
InCaressed, young, starry-eyed masseuse Star Thornton spent every Thursday evening with Artem Almazov, the unsmiling billionaire who owned the cruise ship she worked on. Her hands would find his scars, and his body told her things his mouth never would. But just as her heart became his...Artem walked away like she had never touched him at all.
Note: Both books are standalone romances previously published under my pen name Martha Ruthie. These books are spin-offs of the Monaco Bratva series.
Hold On to Me
by Marian Tee
(This book includes Captivated and Caressed, which were previously published under my other pen name Martha Ruthie)
Copyright 2026 by Marian Piñera
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Twenty-four-year-old Ciana poured his champagne at forty thousand feet and pretended not to notice the scar, the silence, or the way the broodingly handsome billionaire watched her like she was the only thing in the cabin worth memorising. Three weeks later, he bought her airline.
ANDREI ALMAZOV HADnever had any trouble finishing a job...until this one: looking after Nico Reyes’s daughter.Find her someone good, his father had begged him through the glass of a prison visitation room. Someone safe. Someone clean. Someone who was Andrei’s complete opposite.
But instead of waiting obediently for him to find her a husband, she insisted on kissing him in the rain. And touching him in the dark. And making him say things in Russian he’d never be able to take back.
That left him no choice but to break her heart...by making it clear he already had someone else.
Captivated
Chapter 1
THE CHAMPAGNE WAS A2011 Blanc de Blancs, and Ciana Reyes poured it the way she poured everything: without a wasted motion, with the kind of control that came from four years of serving first class at thirty-nine thousand feet and a lifetime of refusing to let her hands betray her.
They were betraying her now.
Not visibly. No passenger in cabin would have noticed the micro-tremor in her wrist as she tilted the bottle over the first flute. She caught it before the pour wobbled, locked her elbow, and let the wine fall in a clean, golden arc. But she knew. Her body had become aware of his presence before her eyes confirmed it, the way a compass needle swings north before the traveler has any idea which direction she’s facing.
Seat 1A. Third time in three weeks.
She set the flute on her tray without looking up. Moved to 1B, which was empty, as it always was when he flew. He bought both seats. She had noticed that the first time and told herself it was a business preference, the way some men needed silence the way others needed scotch. By the second time, she had stopped pretending she wasn’t cataloguing his habits.
He never reclined. He never slept. He never asked for anything beyond what was offered, and he declined half of that. He wore dark suits that fit him the way armour fit, not for beauty, but for containment. He was enormous in the way certain men were enormous: not just tall but dense with stillness, as though hisbody had been designed for a kind of violence he had chosen, very deliberately, to hold in reserve.
And the scar. A pale silver seam that ran from his left temple to the hinge of his jaw, pulling the skin taut over the cheekbone in a way that should have been disfiguring but wasn’t. It changed his face, made it more dangerous and impossible to look away from.
Ciana looked away.
She delivered the flute to 1A. "Your champagne, sir."
He took it without touching her fingers. He was meticulous about that, his hand always arriving a breath before or after hers, maintaining a margin of air between his skin and hers that felt less like courtesy and more like a perimeter. She had started to think of it as the exclusion zone. Two centimetres of nothing that somehow weighed more than any hand that had ever actually touched her.
“Thank you.” Low. Accented. Russian, she thought, though it had been sanded down by years of something else. French, maybe. The vowels sat differently in his mouth than they would in a native speaker’s.
She nodded. Smiled. Cabin-professional, eyes-neutral, the expression she had perfected at twenty and now wore like a second uniform. She retreated to the galley.
Raven Burnett was already there, leaning against the beverage cart with her arms crossed and one eyebrow doing the thing it did when she had an observation she was going to deliver whether Ciana wanted it or not.
