The Boss's Bride

Olivia Vance has been chasing Castellano Security's offshore accounts for a blog that pays in exposure and the occasional hundred-dollar check. Mark Holloway worked in the company's accounting department for eleven years. He disappeared three weeks ago, two days before he was scheduled to meet the state auditor. So she elbows past a Tribune reporter to the brass railing and asks about him out loud, in front of the cameras. The man at the podium wears a charcoal suit that costs more than six months of her rent. Leo Castellano is polite, unbothered, and precise about where the knife goes: he calls her outlet less reputable and her reporting *your little blog*. Then Liv says a name that is not in any of her files. *Do you know the name Elena Vance?* And his face goes pale. Leo has a problem she could not have guessed at. His father's will left the controlling shares of Castellano Security jointly to Leo and to Francesca Castellano, on a condition: he marries within one calendar year, and not to anyone on the company payroll. Francesca has already vetted the candidates and found them all wrong. She wants him to fail and she wants his chair. So Leo makes Liv an offer across his desk, with a ring box sitting between them. Six months of pretending to be engaged, for his mother's sake and the board's. In exchange, Liv gets everything he has on how her father died in a warehouse fire. She says yes for her father. She stays for the rest of it: Sunday dinner at Donna Castellano's table, where a plate is still set for Leo's dead sister; a hospital room where her mother Elena is stage four and waiting on a kidney; and Frankie, who can produce a donor by tomorrow if Liv will only tell her what Leo keeps in his office safe. What is in the safe is worse than a bribe. A shell company called Prometheus Holdings, with Thomas Vance's signature on the incorporation papers. And a photograph of a dark-haired woman with a daisy behind her ear who is not Isabella at all, but the half-sister Leo has been quietly looking for. And Detective Brannigan, who has been on Leo for three years, mouths three words at Liv across a ballroom. *I see you.* A contemporary boss romance about a conditional will, a fake engagement, a whistleblower nobody can find, and two people who each came to the table holding a secret the other one needed. The romance is closed-door.