The Billionaire's Obsession

The envelope holds four thousand eight hundred dollars. Mostly twenties, some fifties, earned in tips over double shifts, a lunch counter, and three months of walking a neighbor's dogs. The corners are soft from being counted and recounted at two in the morning by phone light, so it wouldn't wake Chloe. Natalie Porter has never been inside the St. Regis. She sits at table 47 at the back in a dress off the rack, between a retired professor who smells of menthol and a hedge fund wife who looks at her chipped polish and goes back to her phone. Lot twenty-three. Victorian filigree brooch, seed pearls and garnets, property of the estate of Eleanor Porter. Her grandmother, who raised her and Chloe in the brownstone on East 79th and wore that brooch every Sunday until her hands got too shaky to pin it straight. The bidding goes to five thousand. Natalie has four thousand eight hundred, and that money was the surgery fund for her sister, already short by forty-two thousand dollars. Julian Vaughn buys it without turning around. Then he takes the microphone and announces that Vaughn Development has acquired the Porter family brownstone at 147 East 79th Street. A mixed-use luxury residence, breaking ground in the fall. They will be preserving the facade. He means to gut the house and keep the front of it, like a taxidermy job. His assistant catches Natalie on the subway stairs with a business card and a message: if she wants a second chance, she knows where to find him. What he offers is a job. Heritage consultant on her own grandmother's house, identifying the original features worth saving, reporting to his project manager, Meredith Cole. So Natalie goes to work inside the rooms she learned to walk in, for the man who owns them, with her sister in a hospital bed and a number she cannot reach. And the site starts going wrong. A window order that nobody placed. A consulting fee paid out of the renovation budget to an LLC with someone's initials on it. Security-camera footage that gets Manuel, who has worked this block for twenty years and has three kids, walked off the job in one morning. Chloe already knows more than Natalie wants her to. *"I know what it costs. I know you sold Grandma's brooch."* A contemporary billionaire romance about a house being taken apart, a sister running out of time, and a woman who has to work for the man holding everything she has left. The romance is closed-door.