The Boss's Convenient Wife

A single calla lily sits in the middle of Clara Hart's kitchen table at dawn, cut before the greenhouse opened, before the bank opened, before she has to face the number she has been avoiding. She tucks it into her bag on the way to the bank. Maybe for luck. The answer is no. Her grandmother's second mortgage on the greenhouse is ninety days past due, and the loan officer will not say who bought the note. He will only tell her that the investor who ordered the pull is upstairs today, and that *he's not the kind of man who changes his mind.* Clara finds him in a corner office with his back to the door, phone to his ear. *Pull the Hart Greenhouse loan. They're a risk. I want it resolved by close of business.* His name is Julian Ashford. Ten minutes later she has knocked his coffee across his desk, his keyboard, and a jacket he informs her is *Canali. Italian wool.* He does not throw her out. He tells her to come back tomorrow. What he wants is a wife. His father rewrote the will six weeks before he died: Julian takes no control of the family hotel company unless he is married, and he has *until my fortieth birthday. That's fourteen months from now.* Miss it and everything passes to his brother Grant, who already has a buyer lined up. So the legal team has drafted a contract. Six months. A confidentiality clause, a dissolution agreement, and one plain line — *no intimacy.* In exchange, Julian clears the eighty-seven thousand owed on the greenhouse, pays the forty-three thousand in Elena Hart's medical bills, and signs the property over to Clara *free and clear, with a five-year lease at a dollar a year.* He also has a file on her family: photographs, her father's debts, her grandmother's hospital records. Clara calls it surveillance. Julian calls it due diligence. She signs anyway, because her father's cancer took every dollar she had and her grandmother is the one thing she has left to lose. What neither of them planned on is the lie Clara has to tell Elena, the sister who texts *I want my cut if you liquidate*, an investigator's report that went deeper than Julian authorized, and a diagnosis her grandmother has been hiding for months. A contemporary billionaire romance set among the greenhouses and locks of Ballard and the glass towers of downtown Seattle, about a woman with dirt permanently under her fingernails and a man who has spent fifteen years solving everything with money, right up to the thing that cannot be bought. The romance is closed-door.