The Tycoon's Contract

*You can't be serious, Marco.* Lena Marchetti presses her palm flat against the ledger, the paper warm from the morning's first batch of cannoli still cooling in the display case. The numbers blur and then refuse to. The bakery has been in her family longer than the block has had its current name. The building has not. That distinction did not matter for forty years and it matters enormously now, because somebody has bought the freehold and somebody's lawyers have found a clause. Declan Vance is the somebody. Declan Vance also has a proposal, which he delivers in person, which is either courtesy or theatre and which Lena is not in a position to refuse either way. Paper promises. A one-sided arrangement dressed as a partnership. A penthouse she does not want to live in and an appearance schedule she has to memorise. What follows: a last straw, a man with a plan, an offer she cannot refuse, paper promises, a gala and the gutter outside it, a penthouse that functions as a prison, baking for lions, and a sister who knows too much to be handled with anything less than the truth. *He lied to me, Dad. Declan. He never cancelled the demolition permit. He signed it.* The counter was cold against my hip. The chandelier light scattered across his face. I kissed him until I couldn't breathe, and then I pulled back, stunned at myself. The cost is plain. If Lena signs, the bakery survives and she does not get to say a true sentence in public for a year. If she refuses, she keeps her name and loses the only building her father ever owned outright. Declan has an easier decision and a worse one, and he has already made the wrong one before the book opens. Contemporary billionaire romance with a family bakery, a freehold sold out from under it, an arrangement written entirely in one party's favour, an old history neither of them mentions first, explicit scenes, and a guaranteed happy ending.