The Heir's Blackmail Bride

He walked her into his office with a manila folder and a ninety-day deadline and called it a proposal. She walked out three blocks later, shaking with a fury that had nowhere to go, knowing she was going to say yes anyway.

Elena Marchetti has spent ten years rebuilding other families’ histories because someone took hers.

She is a preservation architect with a Columbia guest lecture on her record and eighteen months of hand-painted plasterwork to her name, and she has built a career on not needing anyone to hand back what was taken.

When an email from Castellan International arrives with the word consultation in the subject line and the Belmere Hotel in the body, she puts on her good blazer and takes the subway, because she is tired enough for that specific hope.She arrives to find a man standing at a window looking at the city the way someone looks at a spreadsheet they are about to balance, and a folder on the desk between them containing her brother’s federal wire fraud on three counts and the name of the U.S. attorney’s office that will have it by Friday if she says no.

Damon Castellan turns thirty-five in ninety days.His grandfather’s will requires him to be legally married by that date or control of Castellan Industries reverts to a trust his cousin has already begun positioning himself to direct.There are a dozen socially acceptable candidates.He chose Elena Marchetti, and he tells her exactly why:

her name still carries weight with the old-money board members who never quite accepted how his father acquired the Belmere a decade ago.Optics. He says that word with the flat efficiency of a man who has been being efficient his entire life and has never once stopped to ask whether efficiency and choosing are the same thing.They are not. His grandfather, who drafted the clause, knew they were not.Damon is about to find out why that distinction matters.

She says yes in forty-eight hours. With her own terms, written herself, covering every clause he left room to interpret.

A journalist is pulling city records on the Belmere acquisition.The cousin is working the board. The marriage has to look real, which means they have to be in the same rooms, the same townhouse, the same conversation, every day, and neither of them is particularly good at sharing space with someone they cannot manage.

He stops trying to manage her somewhere around week three. She stops pretending she doesn’t see through him somewhere around week four. The folder is still in his desk drawer. That is the problem neither of them has figured out how to talk around yet.

Perfect for fans of Rina Kent, Penelope Douglas, and Danielle Lori.

The Heir’s Blackmail Bride is a full-length standalone dark billionaire romance with HEA and no cliffhanger. Contains mature content, steam, and a heroine who wrote her own terms into a blackmail contract and still came out knowing exactly who she was.