The Mogul's Vow

*Simone Reyes, Salty Kiss Events.* She started it three years ago with a secondhand laptop and an ambition she was too embarrassed to say out loud. The folder against her chest holds thirty-seven pages of legalese and the terms that could change everything: *Eighteen weddings booked through the end of next year, with an option to extend.* It is a hotel job, and the hotel is the Ashford on Cannery Row, six storeys of pale stucco and wrought iron with scaffolding still on the east wing. She has already sketched three seating arrangements for a third-floor ballroom. The problem is her business partner's first rule, written on a napkin the night they incorporated. *Don't fall in love with the client.* Simone broke that rule once, in a vineyard in Carmel Valley, planning a tenth anniversary party for a man with kind eyes and a terrible marriage. The marriage did not survive. Neither did her reputation, for a while. It cost her two years of backyard birthdays and one dog's funeral before anyone would trust her with anything that mattered. And she has met Logan Ashford exactly four times. What Simone does not know is what is being asked of him. His brother wants the chain sold. *Then the board votes. And I have enough proxies to sell to Keystone by February.* The counter-offer on the table is a marriage that makes the board comfortable: *Victoria comes from real estate money. Her family has connections.* The only thing standing between the hotel and a sale is a grandmother who still holds the majority shares, still lives in the building her husband raised when Cannery Row was sardine cans, and has opinions about all of it. So the woman hired to plan other people's weddings finds herself booked into eighteen months of close quarters with a man who is being manoeuvred toward an engagement that is not his idea, at a venue she needs more than she can admit. A closed-door billionaire romance set on the Monterey Peninsula, about a second-chance business, a family fight over a hotel, and two people learning the difference between a good arrangement and a real one.