The Boss's Ultimatum

The Conti Group lobby smells like polished brass and someone's ambition, and Riley Torres has circled the block twice so she would not arrive too early. She is sitting on a leather bench that cost more than her car, watching Austin cross the marble floor in cowboy boots and tailored suits, and her palms are sweating through a lie she spent three sleepless nights building. *Appraisal firm went under. Lost my license in the dissolution.* Simple, plausible, and impossible to check, because the firm's records were sealed in the bankruptcy. Riley has been carrying people since she was sixteen. That was the year her father walked across a parking lot with a duffel bag and did not look back, and she sat on the floor with a stack of bills and one envelope stamped FINAL NOTICE and made herself a promise she has never once put down. Her sister Olivia was four then. Olivia is opening a bakery now, and she needs a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and Riley intends to get it. What she does not expect is that Dominic Conti checks. In a matter of days he is looking at the real record: the license was not lost in a bankruptcy, it was surrendered under investigation, and there is a note about a pending complaint. He does not fire her. What he does instead is harder to live with, because Dominic has his own reasons for keeping people at arm's length and a photograph on his desk of a brother who died on black ice, and because his father sits at the head of the boardroom table and his rival in the executive suite is already assembling the version of events that ends with Dominic gone. Then the file Riley is given to learn the systems on turns out to be the loan on her sister's bakery. Then a manila folder comes out of a desk drawer with a single sheet of paper in it and an offer attached: the acquisition bid closes in forty-eight hours, Dominic keeps the final version on his shared drive, and Riley has watched him type his password a dozen times. A contemporary billionaire workplace romance set in Austin, about a woman who lied her way into a corner office to save her sister and a boss who already knows. The romance is closed-door.