The Tycoon's Secret : A Forced Proximity, Billionaire's Bargain Billionaire Romance, livre ebook

The apartment has two rooms if you count the bathroom, and the bathroom does not count because the toilet runs and the landlord stopped answering his calls three weeks ago. Everett Hawthorn is nineteen. He is holding a baby against his chest. The crib is a cardboard box lined with a blanket the social worker left, the bottles are still in their packaging, and the papers on the counter carry a signature in blue ink that smudged where her hand was shaking.
The baby's name is Samuel. She picked it.
*No one will ever know*, Everett says into the dark. It takes him weeks to get the story straight, months to make it sound like truth, and years to stop flinching when somebody says your brother and means Samuel. By the time the boy is old enough to ask questions, there is only one answer left.
Twenty-two years later, Keira O'Donnell is tracing the margin of her proposal for the seventh time in the TitanSoft boardroom while a fern dies in its pot. Seventy-two million for the AI division: full IP transfer, all current contracts, a two-year consulting agreement for the engineering leads, closing by end of quarter.
Everett comes in without knocking, does not apologise for being late, and does not look at her. *I know who you are. And I know who your father is.* Then he slides a single sheet of paper across the table. A joint venture. Sixty-forty control split. His veto on top of it.
She calls it a poison pill. He tells her he brought her there to find out whether she had the spine for real negotiations, and that she does not.
Then he catches her in the hallway and tells her Leo Vance, a senior associate at her father's firm, was in his inbox last week offering to broker a separate deal behind her back. He puts a card in her palm. Orcas Island. Two days, no boardrooms. The ferry leaves Friday at six.
Somewhere across the city, a journalist with a platinum bob and gold rings on every finger is already working the one question Everett has answered the same way his entire adult life.
A closed-door billionaire romance about an acquisition, an island with no boardrooms, and a lie old enough to have grown roots and branches and a life of its own.