Promised by the Billionaire

Five in the morning in Astoria, and Lena Vasquez lets herself into Parlor of Petals without turning on the overheads. She checks the cooler, snaps off wilted leaves, pulls the stems that have gone soft at the base. Then she opens the stack of mail she shoved onto the counter yesterday: three envelopes, the same cream-colored paper, the same red stamp in a font designed to induce panic. Sofia Vasquez. Outstanding balance: forty-seven thousand, three hundred and twelve dollars. The third letter offers a payment plan at eighteen percent interest that would take twelve years to clear. Lena folds them into squares, then smaller squares, and puts them in her apron pocket. Her sister's kidney function is at twelve percent. Lena has already been tested as a living donor and come back a blood type mismatch. And before the hospital will so much as schedule the transplant evaluation, it wants two thousand and forty-seven dollars. She has eighteen hundred, counted out in pennies and crumpled twenties on her bedroom floor. Lena was twelve the night a man in a silk tie sat at her father's kitchen table and explained that fifteen years of savings would be held as collateral. Sterling Investments kept the money. Her father worked double shifts at a garage until his heart gave out, and she found him at that same table. At his funeral she made a promise. *I will never owe anyone anything. I will take care of us myself.* Which is why it matters, very much, who is actually behind the loan she finally accepts. Jace Sterling knows exactly what his grandfather did. He has a lawyer file a neutral-sounding LLC overnight, walks into her shop as its representative, and offers terms she cannot afford to refuse. He also asks for two clauses nobody requested: the loan cannot be repaid early, and the borrower must attend weekly liaison meetings with the lender. He tells himself it is restitution. It is also a lie with a schedule attached. After that come a weekend at the family beach house where his brother Daniel has arranged for Eleanor Vance to turn up uninvited; a private blood test Jace paid for using medical records he had no business seeing; and, when the story breaks, a family ultimatum with exactly one condition attached to Jace keeping everything he has. *Publicly denounce the girl.* A contemporary billionaire romance that runs between a Queens flower shop and old Manhattan money, told in both voices, closed-door, about a woman who swore she would never owe anybody anything and a man whose help is indistinguishable from a debt.