Most of All You

Eloise "Crystal" Cates has never known safety. Abandoned as a small child by a dying mother and raised, unwanted and abused, by a father who never wanted her, she has learned to survive by feeling as little as possible — and now makes her living dancing at a club called the Platinum Pearl, keeping every man who watches her at arm's length.

Gabriel Dalton carries his own scars. As a boy he survived a long captivity that left him unable to bear being touched, and he comes to the club with a strange, halting proposal: he will pay Crystal to help him learn, slowly, how to tolerate closeness again. What begins as a transaction becomes something neither of them expected, as two people who have spent their lives armoring themselves start, cautiously, to let each other in.

Most of All You is a tender, heavy contemporary romance about trauma, healing, and the courage it takes to believe you deserve to be loved. Mia Sheridan writes damaged, deeply sympathetic characters, and gives them a love story that never shortcuts the hard, slow work of recovery.