Promised by the Mogul

Nora Chen has been making this lavender dough since she was twelve. Her mother taught her to close her eyes and feel the gluten instead of looking at it, and her mother is gone, and the bakery on North State Street is two months behind on the loan. The call comes at dawn: foreclosure proceedings have been filed, thirty days to vacate. Then the secondhand convection oven gives up at 287 degrees, the caterer cancels two hundred macarons for a wedding rehearsal, and the non-refundable deposit is three hundred dollars against a four thousand dollar payment. Her father Harold kept the books after her mother died and did not keep them well. He stands in the kitchen doorway with his cardigan buttoned through the wrong hole and will not meet her eyes. Declan O'Shea wants the building. He is a developer with a hotel project, a dead father's trust, and a brother named Liam who is quietly working to take the company out from under him. Nora tears up his first offer in front of his face. He tells Liam about it afterwards, and Liam calls her *"A Chen with some fight."* What Declan brings back is not a better price. It is a contract his lawyer drafts overnight: temporary marriage, term thirty days, consideration being full satisfaction of every debt and lien against Sweet Memory Bakery. Nora does not sign it. She revises it. Separate bedrooms. Her recipes stay hers. The bakery name stays. He does not touch her oven. And she rewrites his tidy dissolution clause into something with notice periods and mutual release, because she has watched a woman in this family sign papers she did not fully understand. What neither of them budgeted for is the terms of his father's trust, which says the Gold Coast property cannot be sold while he is married to a tenant. If he makes it permanent, the hotel dies. He calls his lawyer anyway. There is also a citywide baking competition on Navy Pier, a borrowed chef's coat with another man's name on it, a board meeting where a brother presents a site that does not exist, and a great deal of very good food. This is a contemporary billionaire romance about a marriage of convenience negotiated line by line by the woman it was meant to corner, and about two people who each inherited a business they did not choose. Closed-door, and it ends in a bakery kitchen with a tray of lavender macarons and an order queue that will not stop.