The Tycoon's Fake Fiancee

Leah is seventeen the first time an Ashford takes something from her family. She stands in the back of the shop while her father signs Donovan's Florals over to Ashford Industries, and a man in a three-piece suit with silver hair and a cane he does not need reads the document over for errors. *"She's got your stubborn chin. A shame. That won't serve her in the world my family builds."* *"Plants grow back,"* her father says afterwards. *"People don't."* By the time it matters again, both her parents are dead and Leah is the one who handles everything. Her brother Toby has leukaemia. The insurance company has decided that a bone marrow transplant counts as experimental under his policy, which it is not. The figure Leah has been working to is six months: six months to get the money together, six months for a donor match to clear, six months for Toby to be strong enough. Then his blast counts come back up in the bloodwork, and the transplant moves to three or four weeks, and the hospital offers a two-week grace period before the bed reservation is suspended. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Toby, propped up on his pillows with a graphic novel he is too tired to read, says he was hoping for something with more zeros. What he actually asks her for is a morning in the ocean. Just once, before he goes under. And then an Ashford walks into the flower shop with a proposition and a second document already in his jacket. Two weeks of a fake engagement, ending at a board vote. In exchange, a trust agreement drafted and notarised before the question was ever put to her, for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, disbursed within twenty-four hours of the announcement. *"Why should I trust you?"* *"You shouldn't."* A fake-engagement billionaire romance about the price of a promise, a family business that was signed away once already, a cousin who has spent six months trying to push Leah out of what is left of it, and a boy in a hospital bed naming his beanies. The romance is closed-door.