Bought by the Tycoon

Six-thirty in the morning in the Mission District, and the fog hasn't burned off. Maya Chen fits her key into the lock of The Gilded Page, the brass worn smooth by her father's hands and now hers, and flips on the fluorescents. Old paper, stale coffee, a building that has been standing a long time and isn't apologizing for it. Under the counter are the bills she shoved there last week. She knows the figures by heart. She counts the days until foreclosure. Then the bell jingles and her cousin Jasper walks in wearing sneakers that cost more than she pays in rent, holding a cream envelope, his eyes fixed somewhere to the left of her face. The building is being sold out from under her. The buyer is Damon Reeves, who runs a development company from a corner office downtown, who watched his mother's suitcase go out the front door when he was twelve and wrote a single line in a leather journal that night: *Lesson One: Anyone can leave. Therefore, I need no one.* Maya saves his number in her phone under a name meant to make her smile later — *The Enemy* — and walks into his glass tower to fight him. The man she finds isn't the one she came for. Damon keeps a filing cabinet of scholarship letters, a fund in his mother's name paying tuition for kids from the Excelsior, hidden because his brother Sebastian has been documenting every soft thing he does and intends to take it to the board. Maya is hiding things too: the novels she writes and tells no one about, and Nora upstairs, whose early-onset Parkinson's is getting worse, whose hands tremble more and whose memory slips more often. *"I have Parkinson's. I'm not dead,"* Nora tells her. Jasper takes the job Sebastian offers. He hands over the debt, the medical bills, the manuscripts. *"He asked what leverage he had,"* he says, and picks up his coffee. So Maya has to choose between the man who bought her cousin's share of her family's building without asking, and the brother who registered a shell company called Arcturus Holdings to take everything from both of them. Damon has to decide whether the lesson he built his life on is worth keeping. Neither of them is good at trusting. There is a broken window with plywood over it, a hand-painted sign that reads STILL HERE, and a signed first edition tracked down through a man who knew a guy who owed a guy a favor. A contemporary billionaire romance set in San Francisco, closed-door, ending where it began — under the pendant lamp of a bookstore worth saving.