The Billionaire's Convenient Wife

He will keep the bakery open. That is the vow, and Duncan makes it before he has any idea what it will cost or who will have to pay. The flour dust settled on my forearms like a second skin, fine and white and smelling of yeast and my grandmother's patience. I had been kneading the same batch of dough for eleven minutes, which is nine minutes longer than it needed, because stopping would have meant reading the letter again. Rosalind does not want a husband. She wants the lease, the ovens and another eighteen months. The offer she cannot refuse arrives with a lawyer and a figure. She refuses it twice, on principle, and accepts it on the third pass for reasons that are entirely practical and that she will spend the rest of the book relitigating. There is a deal sealed with a handshake in a kitchen that smells of burnt sugar. There is a world she never wanted and is expected to perform in. There is a journal she could not close, a facade that cracks in public and at speed, and a scar she has never shown anybody including the man she is legally married to. Penelope disapproves. Eleanor approves for entirely the wrong reasons. *You wanted the land. You told me it was a business expense. You sat in my kitchen and lied to my face.* *Because you wouldn't have accepted the truth.* *You don't get to—* With the noise going on around them, she kissed him like she had been waiting her whole life to do it. Duncan kissed her back. He tasted of salt and coffee and something sweet, sugar probably, transferred from her hands. Perfect for readers who love marriage-of-convenience romance where the convenience is genuinely inconvenient, a heroine who refuses twice on principle, a bakery that is a character rather than a backdrop, and a hero whose vow costs him considerably more than he budgeted for.