The Magnate's Fake Fiancee

Quinn Delaney has been staring at the heart monitor so long the green line has burned itself into her vision. Her brother Liam will be twelve next month. His fingers are still a child's fingers against the hospital sheets, and his Yankees cap is on the nightstand because he has refused to take it off for six weeks, even for the MRIs. Dr. Patel has good news and a number. The trial is at Sloan Kettering, the response rate in the phase two trials is ninety-three percent, and the insurance will not touch it. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the full course. The compassionate care fund has an eighteen-month waitlist. The deposit is due by the first of November. Quinn does the arithmetic before she can stop herself. She has three thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars, a florist's shop, and an apartment in Brooklyn where the rent is two months behind and the landlord has stopped calling and started leaving notes. So she crashes a party and walks up to a stranger. *"I just need five minutes. Please."* Bennett Holloway laughs at her. Then he gives her a black card with silver lettering and tells her: tomorrow, noon, his office, don't be late. What he wants is a fiancée. There is a provision in a merger agreement he is trying to close, and the Eastman family are old money and conservative and want to see who they are getting into business with. A few events. A weekend at the Eastman estate in the Hamptons, with the press taking photos. The deal closes and they go their separate ways. Two hundred thousand dollars. Six months. Signed in blue ink. His father made a bet, lost everything, and died of a heart attack three months later. Bennett has spent five years rebuilding, and if this deal does not close, it all goes. Then somebody puts a brick through the window of Quinn's shop on Lexington, and leaves a note telling her to drop the engagement or the next window is her brother's face. *"I'm not lying. I got a job. A temporary one."* A fake-engagement billionaire romance about a woman selling six months of her life to pay for a clinical trial, and a man buying a family he does not have. The romance is closed-door.