The Tycoon's Ruthless Heart

*I'm not going to sign it.* Cormac Shaw keeps his hand extended, the folder hanging between them like a challenge. The woman on the hotel's front porch has not touched it. Has not even uncrossed her arms. Her braid catches the low October sun, red as rusted iron, and the freckles across her nose look darker against skin gone pale. *You haven't read it.* *I don't need to.* Jillian Porter's voice holds the flat certainty of somebody who has rehearsed this refusal a hundred times in her head. *I know what it says. You want to turn my family's hotel into a parking lot for rich people.* *A flagship property. Sixty-eight luxury suites, a rooftop restaurant, a spa.* He lowers the folder. *The Aster has been losing money for twelve consecutive quarters. You're three months behind on the mortgage.* Both of those statements are true. Neither of them is the reason he is standing on that porch, and it will take him most of the book to say what is. Margaret has run the kitchen since before Jillian was born and has a copper pot she will not let anybody else touch. Harper has the accounts and has been quietly not showing them to anybody. Declan has a doctor's note in his jacket and a deadline that has nothing to do with the hotel. What follows: a bulldozer in the garden, the price of a pasta recipe, a fork in the deal, the city's own ultimatum, the enemy of an enemy, a doctor's note, a last good offer, and a copper pot that remembers more than the people using it. *Leo's a traitor.* *He's a good brother.* He thought about the way she'd kissed him in the basement, her hands on his face, her voice steady. Contemporary billionaire romance with a failing family hotel, a developer with a reason he will not state, a kitchen run on one recipe and one pot, a city deadline nobody can move, a guaranteed happy ending.