The Billionaire's Bride

Fran Delaney is on the phone with a florist, nudging a Cymbidium stem a quarter inch left. *"Yes, I understand they're already cut. No, I don't want a refund. I want you to hold them on ice for forty-eight hours."* Behind her: three hundred chairs, each with a hand-tied ivory bow. A dance floor waxed that morning. An altar arch draped in cascading jasmine, waiting for a bride who might not show. The bride shows. Jessica Park crosses the ballroom in her train with her makeup done and her eyes raw, and she is not wearing her engagement ring. There is a video from the groom's bachelor party. Her mother has seen it. Her board has seen it. Fran needs this wedding the way she needs air. Her sister Lily is a lung transplant candidate with a surgery date in September and a hospital bill Fran cannot look at without her stomach dropping. So she phones the groom herself and tells him to apologise publicly. Ethan Sterling tells her to stay in her lane and set up the flowers, and hangs up. They have history. Two years ago he gave an interview calling her work amateur hour and saying he wouldn't trust her to plan a birthday party. He walks into the ballroom, sees her, and says *"Of all people."* The wedding collapses. Fran is fired. Her phone buzzes in the corridor with three missed calls from the hospital. And then Ethan comes back with a contract. Six months from date of execution, renewable by mutual consent. Public appearances, a timeline, a non-disclosure clause, a breach penalty. Her sister's medical costs wired directly to the hospital within seventy-two hours of signing. Tucked into paragraph seven, subsection C: *No physical intimacy is required or implied by this agreement.* What Ethan is protecting is not the merger. It is a girl in Liverpool named Abbie who is seventeen, who lives under a security team's watch, and who does not know he exists. Derek Webb knows about her, and Derek Webb wants a board seat. A closed-door second-chance billionaire romance about a marriage of convenience signed by two people who each have a sister they would ruin themselves for, and a paper lantern released at the end by people who do not quite know what they are wishing for.