The Billionaire's Contract

A fly is working the window at Molly's Diner, crawling from a smear of maple syrup back to the glass and back again. Lila Collins has been watching it for ten minutes and cannot decide whether that makes it stupid or just persistent. Late afternoon in Stony Point in October. The tourists are gone, the health inspector is telling Stan he has six months to bring the floor drains up to code, and Lila has just been told there is no advance coming. She was asking for two thousand dollars. Her brother Romy is at Brigham and Women's in Boston with leukemia, on a protocol that is buying time and not enough of it, and the treatment that might actually work is the one insurance decided was elective. Two hundred thousand dollars. The man at the counter is not from Stony Point. His suit is charcoal and well-cut, his shoes are leather, and there is a permanent crease set between his brows. He reads the menu like a legal document, orders the burger medium rare and a slice of apple pie, and takes a call he does not bother to lower his voice for. The board wants a stable marriage. That was the word they used. They want proof he is not a liability. Then he says it across the counter: *You need money. I need a wife.* Cole Vandenberg has until the fifteenth of November. Without a spouse by the vote, the chair goes to his sister Margot, who was passed over for it because their father believed the company should go to a son and who has never forgiven either of them. Behind her is their cousin Dex, hiding behind a shell company, waiting to take the business their grandfather built apart and sell it in pieces. What the contract does not cover: a fidelity clause in a marriage that isn't one, a leak somewhere inside the company that gets Margot her information before Cole gets his, and the pictures Romy keeps drawing of the Northern Lights, which Lila once promised to go and see with no idea how she would ever pay for it. A billionaire marriage-of-convenience romance with a small-town spine, running from a diner counter in Maine to a boardroom and back again, and ending at a lobster festival over fried dough, a plastic lobster named Clawdia and an apology nobody is sure how to begin; closed-door.