The Tycoon's Vow

The voicemail comes through while Genevieve Hartley is elbow-deep in takeout lo mein and a spreadsheet that refuses to balance. Her grandmother's voice, thinner than it was six months ago. They have doubled the rent at the nursing home. If she can't pay by the first, she will have to move out. She is sorry to bother her. Genevieve drops her chopsticks, sends soy sauce across her desk calendar, and does the math. Nana's monthly cost at Meadowbrook was forty-two hundred. Doubled is eighty-four hundred, plus the back balance she has clearly been hiding. Sixteen days. Then her editor texts about the Sterling Innovations earnings report. Revenue spikes that don't match known contracts. Expenses that appear and disappear. If Genevieve can break it, there is a ten-thousand-dollar bonus attached. Three weeks later she is standing behind a marble pillar at a black-tie gala with a borrowed press credential and the wrong photo on it, listening to Beckett Sterling tell a man named Hale that Pendragon Capital is buying shares and they have to move before the quarterly report. She never gets to write the note. Beck is standing six inches behind her, and he already knows her name, her sources, her angle, and how long she has been standing there. *"You're not covering the gala. You're covering me."* A photographer's flash catches them inches apart. It looks like a fight between lovers. By the time Genevieve reaches the balcony, Sterling's PR team has already called her editor and offered an exclusive: a warm profile of the man behind the company, written by her, or she is fired. Beck did not stumble into this. He hired a private investigator, ran her financials, tracked her sources, and worked out that she was closing in on a shell company controlled by his own VP of Strategy, Duncan Reid. So he made her useful. *"So I created an opportunity." "You created a trap." "Same thing, different framing."* And Vincent Ashford, a senior analyst at Sterling who taught Genevieve how to trace money and has spent weeks quietly discrediting her to her editor, sends her three words with no explanation: don't trust him. A contemporary billionaire romance about an investigative journalist bought with access, a chief executive who cannot afford an honest interview, and a grandmother who has never once asked for help before. The romance is closed-door.