The Tycoon's Bride

Charlotte Vance has spent three weeks learning one client. Margaret Holloway's fountain pen, her daughter's favourite flower, the herringbone linens she mentioned once in passing, the organic honey she tapped a fingernail against in a meeting. Details matter. Details win contracts. The catering job is hers. She can feel the door opening before it swings. Then the café door chimes and Alexander Hart walks in, says he was in the neighbourhood, and is introduced as a friend of the family. By the time Charlie is back out on the pavement, the contract is gone. That afternoon she is in a hospital room where her sister has been under an IV drip for six hours, with a beanie slipped sideways over the place her red hair used to curl. Dr. Patel sits down at eye level and explains that the standard protocol has bought them time but will not get them all the way. There is a targeted immunotherapy trial. The waiting list is eighteen months. Private access costs three hundred thousand pounds. Charlie has about twelve grand in savings and a rented flat. Lily has already done the arithmetic and refuses to let her sister be bankrupted for a maybe. So when Hart sends an email, Charlie goes, and she says so out loud: *Your email said you'd pay for Lily's treatment. That's the only reason I'm here.* The problem, it turns out, is a clause. By the terms of the company shares, the majority holder of the shares has to be married — his grandfather's notion that a settled man makes better decisions. His brother Graham is married. Xander is not. The board gave him a year, and he is nine months into it. His terms are simple. Three months. She plays the part, he pays for the treatment, and afterwards they never see each other again. What is not in the terms: a locked room at the family estate with a photograph in it and a name Xander will only describe as a mistake; a line of sharp, angular handwriting added to the original contract after the old man died; and a contact saved in her own business partner's phone under two initials. A billionaire workplace romance set in London, about a pitch that collapses, an engagement drafted as a business document, a brother quietly editing the paperwork, and the sister in a hospital bed that the whole arrangement is really about. The romance is closed-door.