The Boss's Ruthless Heart

Dominic Hartley counted every second in that hospital room. *The machine had been switched off twenty-three minutes ago.* His father built Hartley Hotels out of one property in Naperville and turned it into twenty-three across the Midwest, and the last thing Dominic promised him was Europe. The other thing he decided, standing in the doorway, he never said aloud. *Never let anyone close enough to hurt you like this again.* Six months later Claire Ashford is shortlisted for the Hartley position, which is the first piece of good news she has had in a while. Her brother Ethan is seventeen and has leukemia. She has been sleeping in hospital chairs and living off vending machines, and the pearl button on her cuff has been hanging by a thread for days because there has been no time. She collides with her new employer in the lobby and paints his white shirt in *a Jackson Pollock of brown liquid.* What follows is not a soft landing. Claire is good at her job and has to prove it repeatedly: a lodge dinner cooked family style for a mother who does not approve of her, a Lakefront Festival with a punishing timeline, a colleague named Meredith with her phone angled like a recording device and a very clear motive. *If you screw up the festival, she gets the permanent position.* Dominic's brother Garrick sits on the board, tracks his calendar, and is not merely a difficult sibling. Vivian Hartley, their mother, decides what is acceptable and sends her adjustments in the morning. And both Dominic and Claire are carrying something they have not said. His is a small girl in Lincoln Park who sees through every wall he builds. *That's Lily. My daughter.* Her own is older and colder, a fire and an insurance report and *the lie she'd carried for fifteen years.* The book is not really about whether they fall for each other. It is about whether two people this practised at managing everything alone can put the weight down in front of a witness. A closed-door second chance romance set in Chicago hotels, hospital rooms and one lakeside lodge, ending in a small room with takeout containers, Lego bricks and nobody holding their breath.