The Tycoon's Convenient Wife

Six days ago Nora Shaw was thinking about butter. The real stuff, from the dairy co-op that still delivers to the back door of Shaw's Bakery every Tuesday at five in the morning, for a family that has been making croissants in the same building since 1954.

Now there is a piece of paper floating in the flour bin, *the ink already smudging against the white powder in a way that made the words look like they were bleeding.* Notice of Foreclosure and Eviction. Under the flour dust, the name Vance Holdings.

Her grandmother is at the bottom of the back stairs, knuckles white on the banister. Evelyn Shaw is seventy-eight. She built the place, and she taught Nora to laminate dough at the age of six, standing on a milk crate to reach the counter.

Across town, Dominic Vance has just been handed his father's terms: manage the family's assets for six months and prove he can handle them, or the estate goes to Lucas Hart, who has been managing it for five years and has already drawn the plans. Hotels, condos, retail. One parcel is holding the whole thing up, and it is the bakery.

Then Dominic's sister Claire, who is on oxygen and thinner every month, learns what her clinical trial actually requires. The foundation behind it will not release two million dollars without *a legally recognized domestic partnership. Marriage, essentially.*

So he makes Nora an offer with nothing decorative anywhere on it. *I need a wife for one year. You need a building. That's the shape of a bargain.*

She takes it, and she is clear about what she is taking. *One year, and then I get the deed free and clear. I get your medical care.* And the oven that has been in her family since 1954.

What neither of them budgeted for is a photograph locked in a drawer, a forged permit, a replaced lock cylinder, an email that splits the world in half, and a man who learned at ten years old, from under a dining table, that *love is a lie businessmen tell women to get what they want.*

A contemporary billionaire romance about a bakery under a foreclosure notice, a twelve-month contract nobody is pretending is romantic, and two people who each signed it to keep somebody else alive. The romance is closed-door.