When Hearts Negotiate

She needs a husband. He needs a reputation. They need to stop falling for each other. Nora Calloway has six weeks to get married or lose controlling interest in her late father's architecture firm to a cousin who'd sell it before the ink dried. Knox Sterling has six weeks to prove he's not his father's fraud scandal - or lose the biggest contract of his career to a heritage council that wants "personal stability" on the deed. The problem? They've spent three years as Marlow Bay's bitterest rivals, trading jabs across zoning hearings and competing bids. Everyone in town knows they can't stand each other. Which is exactly why Knox shows up at her studio with a ring and a term sheet instead of a declaration of war. The deal is simple: a courthouse wedding, six weeks of convincing performance, then a clean exit once both their deadlines are met. No feelings. No complications. Separate bedrooms, obviously. Except then he learns what she lost when her father died. She learns what he rebuilt after his father's fall. They start designing a pier together that neither could have built alone. And somewhere between a parking lot kiss with no audience and a week at her family's beach cottage with no contract language left to hide behind, the fiction stops being fiction at all. Now they're out of time, out of defenses - and completely out of exit clauses for the one thing neither of them negotiated for.