The Mogul's Bride : A Hidden Heir, One-Night Stand Billionaire Romance, livre ebook

Vivian Chase catches her heel in another crack in the lobby's Carrara marble and counts it under her breath. Seventeen visible fractures in what her great-grandfather laid down believing the Chase Hotel would anchor a dynasty. The chandelier over the registration desk works on three of its six arms. *The lobby smelled like lemon polish and failure.*
Her father is at his desk with his hands flat on a manila envelope, and he is not smiling. Henry Chase always smiles. Inside is a sealed bid, already opened and read to him over the phone by the family lawyer: three point two million dollars, below market, for the hotel her mother furnished lamp by lamp and her father rewired by hand. The bank has called in the note on the renovation loan. They are sixty days from default.
The bid is signed personally. Nathaniel Hartwell turned one boutique hotel in SoHo into seventeen properties across three continents, and he has never failed to close a deal.
Then her father takes a sheaf of yellowed papers out of a drawer, brittle, the typewriter ink smudged. Her great-grandfather could not afford to buy the land the hotel stands on, so the Hartwell family leased it to him for ninety-nine years, renewable, with a provision nobody has looked at in a lifetime. If the Chase family defaults, or attempts to sell outside the direct bloodline, the Hartwells may claim the property *through matrimonial succession.*
The lawyer says it will hold. It was signed, witnessed, notarized. And Nathaniel Hartwell happens to be unmarried.
What Vivian does not know is whose idea it was. Eleanor Hartwell telephoned the Chase family lawyer on the Friday, before the bid ever arrived, to make her preferences clear about how the hotel should pass to her grandson. Nathaniel's own handwritten notes call the clause archaic and unenforceable; what he wants on paper is an operational merger and a figurehead title, inside a deadline he has already set.
Her sister complicates it further. Olivia Chase thinks selling is simply what the numbers say, admires what Hartwell did with the Mercer, and something crosses her face when the name is spoken aloud that Vivian notices and cannot place. Derek Vance is circling too, and he is not offering anything as gentle as a merger.
This is a contemporary billionaire romance about a family hotel on the Hudson, a nineteenth-century marriage provision dragged into a modern boardroom, and two people who each assumed the other was the one running the play. Also: a man in a four-thousand-dollar suit dragging a tarp across a ballroom floor in the rain. The heat is closed-door.