Silk & Saltwater

Zara Khan was supposed to marry Ian Silver. At least, that was what a contract written by their fathers decided. Zara arrives in New York expecting an arrogant American billionaire who believes an old family debt entitles him to a wife. Ian drives in from Pennsylvania furious that anyone thought he would accept one. Their first meeting lasts just long enough for Ian to tear the marriage contract into pieces, throw it away, insult Zara’s assumptions, and walk out of the airport. That should have been the end of it. Instead, Zara discovers that the irritating “farmer” she dismissed runs Fabrica Mundorum—an almost completely automated empire spanning cosmetics, agriculture, aquaculture, textiles, publishing, music, conservation, and technologies that seem increasingly impossible the deeper she looks. A nonexistent lipstick becomes a corporate disaster. A care package becomes an argument. An argument becomes music. Music becomes silence. And somewhere between impossible bluefin farms, flowers grown above rivers filled with fish, silk engineered from insects and spiders, and a man who refuses to chase her when she tells him to leave, Zara begins confronting something far more difficult than Ian Silver: the possibility that she has been wrong. About his work. About him. And eventually, about what she wants. Silk & Saltwater is a slow-burn contemporary romance about pride, ambition, second chances, impossible businesses, and two stubborn people learning how to communicate. For Zara, it is also about discovering who she is when she stops measuring herself through wealth, status, family expectations, and the rigid social world she was raised to navigate—and learning how to simply be herself when none of those things can protect her.