Promised by the Tycoon

Poppy Ashford nudges the crystal vase a quarter inch left and steps back to check the light on the peonies. Her mother taught her the trick. *Light remembers what the eye forgets.* Then the front doors of the Meridian swing open and the air shifts the way it does before a storm. The doorman straightens. The concierge's head snaps up. The man crossing the lobby wears a suit the colour of wet slate and speaks into his phone without looking at anyone. *"Get the bulldozer quotes ready for July."* Julian Croft has spent years acquiring historic properties in London. The Meridian has been standing since 1927 and has been losing money for a decade, and he does not consider that a tragedy. *"The Meridian is a beautiful corpse, Miss Ashford. I'm not the one who killed it."* Poppy is the hotel's event planner. She has a Royal Charity Gala for the Prince's Foundation eighteen months in the planning, a confirmed royal patron, and a magazine feature already gone to press. She also has a promise she made in a hospital corridor to a dying woman, and a grandmother's hotel she swore to look after. And she has Theo. Her brother is seventeen, jumpy and hollow-eyed, and he owes money to men who send photographs of his blood on a floor. Julian has a promise of his own, made to a dead man, and a sister named Elodie who draws in charcoal, keeps a nurse he pays for, and refuses to tell him who she is seeing. On his wall hangs the only thing he kept from the old house: a study she made of their mother's hands. As the two of them circle each other over a gala neither can afford to lose, Damian Voss puts an all-cash offer on the table and starts hiring away Poppy's suppliers, and a genealogy note on Julian's desk turns out to matter more than the money. *"No more secrets. No more lies of omission. No more deciding what's best for me without asking me first."* A closed-door contemporary billionaire romance set in a grand London hotel, for readers who want a heroine whose competence is the point and a hero who has to learn the difference between protecting someone and deciding for them.