The Mogul's Bargain

Juliette Preston is tapping a stopped clock with her fingernail while her brother Liam walks the length of their father's boardroom table, telling her what she already knows. The numbers have not worked since Dad died. Then Bennett Hawthorne comes in and takes her father's chair. His offer is clean. Four point two million for all three Preston Inn properties, every outstanding debt assumed, current staff kept a minimum of twelve months, a twenty percent premium for each board member. The offer is good for seven days, and after that it drops to three point eight. *That's not a negotiation. That's a threat with a deadline.* Jules has been running the inn on borrowed time since the funeral, squeezing every dollar out of a place Liam calls a beautiful, bankrupt museum. Bennett has been running on borrowed credibility since a climbing fall in Yosemite broke his femur in three places and his partners decided he was finished. He also has a page she has never seen: a letter of intent her father signed six months before he died, handing Hawthorne first right of refusal. The way out arrives from Liam, of all people. Bennett's funding is under review by an investor named Marcus Chen, and a Bennett who looks unstable is a Bennett who loses that money. A public engagement would make Chen ask questions. It would also make Bennett look grounded, and buy the inn months of press it could never afford. So Jules sketches the terms on a folded piece of paper and carries it to Room 314 at the Mansion on Forsyth. Three months of appearances. A breakup announced later through a mutual source. He crosses out half of it and writes his own in tight, angular script. *Three months. No contract. No sleepovers. Public appearances: minimum three per week.* What neither of them has costed in is her mother abstaining from the vote instead of backing her, a friend who will notice everything, a drawer that opens her eyes, a headline nobody on either side wrote, and a brother who has been meeting someone behind her back for months and taking a job from him. A fake-engagement billionaire romance narrated by Jules, set around a family inn in Savannah, with a magnolia her father planted the year she was born, a signed page nobody wants to discuss, and two people who negotiate every clause except the one that ends up mattering. The romance is closed-door.