The Billionaire's Fake Fiancee

The minister's voice has gone underwater. Diana Reeves stands at her mother's grave holding a photograph, her father's hand closed around hers, and a betting slip crumpling between their palms, still warm from wherever he was last night. She is twenty-one. She has seventy-three dollars in her checking account and a tuition payment due in two weeks. She withdraws from college the next morning, one semester short. Now she is a partner at Reeves & Chen, an events firm on the fourth floor of a converted SoMa warehouse, looking at a spreadsheet that says she is three weeks from losing everything. Her partner Lila has made investments Diana never authorised. Her father still texts, and *important* from him has only ever meant one thing. Then a man in a good charcoal suit and scuffed shoes walks into her office, does not shake her hand, and looks around the room the way you appraise livestock. He is not the client flying in from New York. He has come about her father, and he leaves a day attached to it. That night her phone lights up. *URGENT PROPOSAL: $100,000 for six weeks of your time. Discretion required.* Harrison Lockwood is forty-two, a tech chief executive, famously single, and he is not shopping for an actress. *You negotiate like a shark. That's exactly what I need.* His sister Claire has multiple sclerosis. The Mori deal carries a clause about family stability, and Claire's condition makes him look like a liability, so he needs a couple that reads as real. Fifty thousand up front. Another fifty when the merger closes. Diana climbs forty-seven floors of stairwell to say yes, and then asks for it in cash. What neither of them has priced in is Owen Kim, the rival who sends white roses with a card reading *I see you*, a father who keeps picking up the phone, and the awkward truth that a ring put on for money eventually has to come off. A closed-door billionaire fake-engagement romance set in San Francisco fog, about a woman keeping a promise made at a graveside and a man who has run out of ways to look like he can hold on to anything.