Promised by the Boss

*Flour dusted the air like a blessing Lucy didn't deserve at four in the morning.* The oven has been limping along since 1987. Her father called it Bertha and babied it with prayers and percussive maintenance; Lucy Blakely calls it a time bomb, and this morning it is smoking. She has a burnt caramel pear tart to bake and submit in five hours, the tart that won her father the Pearl Fest Golden Whisk three years running, and she needs it to win again. At seven-fifteen a man in a charcoal suit walks into her Pearl District bakery. His shoes are polished to a mirror shine. His watch is a plain plastic Timex that doesn't match anything else about him. He sets a leather folio on the counter, says his name is Donovan Webb of Webb-Harper Development, slides a demolition order across the counter and tells her the building comes down. Sixty days to move a commercial kitchen. Sixty days with her brother Ethan's surgery still short of the deductible and the bakery's accounts looking like a bloodletting. Lucy throws a tart at his face. What Donovan offers her afterward, in a hospital waiting room, is stranger than the eviction. *Pretend to be my fiancée.* Two months, through the investors' gala where the whole redevelopment board will see him settled and committed to Portland. In exchange he halts demolition until after Pearl Fest and pays for Ethan's surgery, the full cost, whatever it is. Lucy takes the deal on one condition: *Fiancés don't sleep in hotels.* He sleeps on the couch in her apartment above the bakery. So the developer learns to work a pastry station. At the qualifier he wipes flour off his hands, snaps a sprig of thyme in half to release the scent, and tells her that her tart has heart and her rival's has skill, and *skill without heart is just math.* When her name is called she kisses him in front of the judges and calls it a mistake. Neither of them believes her. Then comes a signature, a text from a number Donovan doesn't recognize, and a contract that Harold Finch signed on one date and stamped with another, built so it would look as though Donovan had been lying to her from the first morning. A contemporary fake-engagement romance set among cobblestones, proofing dough and a redevelopment fight, with a bakery, a brother's surgery and a competition tart on the line. Closed-door.