Owned by the Rival

A wet thump as the portfolio hits the marble floor. A coffee lid popping off somewhere in the collision. Then steam, and a dark brown stain spreading across a jacket made of wool that costs more than Elise Marchetti's month's rent. She is on her knees with napkins from her bag, apologizing, before she looks up and sees who she has just ruined. *"I'll pay for the cleaning," I said... "I'm so sorry, I wasn't looking where I was-"* *"Clearly."* One word, low and clipped. Grant Ashford peels the jacket off with two fingers and walks to the elevators with the slightest hitch in his stride, and Elise goes upstairs to pitch the penthouse project with coffee drying on her sleeve. She has been at Sterling Design for four years, drafting other people's concepts and watching Sasha Volkov land the work she wanted. The Ashford penthouse is the kind of commission that gets a designer noticed. It is also the kind of paycheck that covers a kidney transplant, and Elise's brother Luca has been in and out of dialysis for six months, texting her photographs of hospital breakfasts and asking how her day went. The surgery costs three hundred thousand dollars. She has fourteen thousand in savings. She gets the job. Then Julian Cross hands Sasha a co-designer position on it, printed on a business card placed where Elise cannot miss it: lead designer, above her own name. Then there is the Ashford Family Foundation, which awards medical assistance grants for organ transplantation - and requires nomination by an Ashford family member in good standing. The family member who controls it is Grant's mother. Victoria Ashford has already looked Elise over at a gala, asked what her parents did for a living, and produced her brother's name out of nowhere. *"And if I find out that you've manipulated my son into using his name to secure a transplant grant for your brother, I will have you fired so fast you won't know what hit you."* The bylaws leave one door open: a board member of five years' standing can nominate, and a simple majority can vote. Grant has served six, and whether he uses that against his own mother is the question Elise has weeks, not years, to answer. A closed-door billionaire romance about a designer, a glass floor she is terrified to stand on, and a brother on a transplant list that moves slower than he does.