He needs a wife in ninety days or he loses everything his family built. She needs forty three thousand dollars and a reason to stop drowning alone.
Nathaniel Ashford has spent ten years rebuilding the shipping empire his father nearly destroyed, and he refuses to lose it to a dead man's final manipulation: marry by his thirty fifth birthday, or watch the company he saved get carved apart by the one board member who's been circling for years. He doesn't propose to a socialite. He proposes to Wren Sutter, the sharp-tongued logistics manager three floors below his office who has never once wanted anything from him but a fair evaluation. Wren says no. Twice. Until she finds her mother's hospital debt in collections and discovers her boss already quietly paid it off, no strings attached, before she'd agreed to anything at all. What starts as a cold contract, a courthouse wedding, and a house with very clear rules becomes something neither of them can file under a line item when a corrupt client account threatens to expose everything they've built and a board rival tries to prove their marriage is fraud. Nathaniel has to choose between an old family loyalty and the truth. Wren has to choose between protecting her heart and believing that this time, needing someone doesn't mean losing them. A slow burn marriage of convenience romance with a guarded CEO, a heroine who refuses to be managed, one storm-stranded lake house, and a happily ever after neither of them saw coming.