ThE WIDOWER'S BARGAIN: An Age-Gap Grumpy Fake Fiancé Romance
Three weeks after burying her father, Clara Beaumont came home to discover her inheritance came with a deadline - and a stranger willing to pretend to marry her to save it.
Clara was supposed to scatter her father's ashes, lock up the vineyard, and disappear back to her San Francisco life. Instead she finds a clause buried in her grandmother's marital retention agreement: the land passes to a contingent trust on her thirtieth birthday unless she is married. She has twenty-eight months. The estate has six months of operating capital. And the only people who can help are circling like the salt wind off the cove - neighbors with cash offers, a council member with a grudge against her family, and a stranger she has never met.
His name is Rowan Vale. He owns Vale Maritime three miles up the headland, and he has, it turns out, been quietly paying her father's creditors for nine years. He sits across her grandmother's kitchen island the second time they meet, lays out a fake engagement on a chipped legal pad, and asks her for two things: time, and the room to be wrong about her.
Clara writes eight rules. He signs all eight.
Then they have to learn how to perform.
A charity auction at the Driftwood. A weekend at a coastal inn with one room available. A grant interview that requires them to look like a couple who has, somehow, fallen in love. The space between her hand at the small of his back and what she is supposed to feel narrows by centimeters over a single restrained, devastating summer - until a council vote, an anonymous tip to the local press, and a letter in pencil from her dying father force them both to choose what is real.
Inside you'll find:
An age-gap, grumpy, fake-fianc romance that earns every centimeter of its slow burnA heroine with fire, a tongue, and a Stanford degree she will absolutely deploy against youA widower hero who has not let himself want anything in a decade - and a woman who reads him like a balance sheetA small Pacific Northwest town with gossip, ghosts, and a vineyard that may not surviveOne room. One harbor permit at stake. One letter that breaks them both openA literary, restrained, quietly devastating love story with a happily-ever-after that has to be earned
For readers who want a romance that takes its time. For readers who notice the difference between two people who are pretending and two people who have stopped pretending without knowing it. For readers who have been waiting for an age-gap fake-fianc romance that takes its characters seriously, takes its slow burn at face value, and takes them somewhere real.
Some bargains are made twice. The second time, you mean it.
One-click and step inside Beaumont House - the door is open, the rain is starting, and a man is waiting at the other end of a kitchen island who hasn't been allowed to want anything in nine years. He is about to be allowed.
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