The Tycoon's Obsession

Grant Calloway has fired three architects in two years for turning up with PDFs and promises. So Sienna Fox cut birch in her kitchen at midnight and carried the model up Calloway Tower in a padded case. The hotel rises in tiers, each floor stepped back to catch the wind, the facade a lattice of living green wall and cantilevered glass. She spent weeks on the planting alone, working out which native species survive salt air, which root systems will not damage the facade, which flowers bloom in which season so the building changes colour through the year. Grant goes down on one knee to look at it. He does not say yes. What he says instead, later, is that he cannot trust someone whose work has a crack in it before they break ground — because there is one, in the model itself, a fractured support beam she missed and Derek Vance found, and Derek taps it in front of everybody and calls it structural failure in a presentation piece. Derek Vance is not a bystander. He has been bleeding the company for months, he has a man on every site crew, he has a woman inside Sienna's firm, and his son has just proposed to Grant's sister Julia. What Sienna cannot say out loud is why she needs this contract. If she loses it she loses her apartment, and she loses her mother's medical care, and her mother does not have the time for her to find another client. And underneath all of it is a collapse from years ago, an investigation, a structural engineering firm that closed because its founder was dead, and a father who aged a decade in six months before it killed him. Grant knows more about that than he has told her. The moment the book actually turns on happens in daylight on a live site, with a cement truck idling: Sienna puts her reputation on soil data and asks him to stop the pour, and he does. A billionaire workplace romance about an architect who builds things that breathe, a client who only believes what he can put his hands on, and a rival who plays the long game through other people's children. Closed-door, and it ends in an empty lot at sunrise with two people sketching.