Grant Cole doesn't lose. Not contracts, not rivals, not the company his grandfather built from a single tugboat into a shipping empire. But his grandfather's will has one final order to give from the grave: marry within ninety days, or controlling shares pass to the cousin who's spent a decade trying to dismantle everything Grant's built. He needs a wife. He does not need a distraction — especially not the sharp-tongued boatyard owner who humiliated him in front of half the harbor over a foreclosure he didn't even know his company held the paper on.

Maren Olsen needs a miracle. The boatyard is the last thing her father left her, and the bank is circling. When the man responsible for her ruin offers to erase her debt, save her family's legacy, and hand her the restoration contract of a lifetime — in exchange for nine months as his convincing, contractual wife — she tells herself it's just business. A signature. A role.

But there are no cameras in the west wing of his estate at midnight. No contract clause for the way he watches her across a room like he's already decided she's his. No line item for what happens when staged intimacy stops feeling staged — when his control starts to feel less like ownership and more like devotion, and her defiance starts to feel less like survival and more like need.

Grant Cole made his name never wanting anything he couldn't control. Maren Olsen is the one thing he can't. And when his cousin finds a way to expose the marriage as a sham with everything — company, home, her boatyard, and the wife he never planned to actually want — on the line, Grant has to decide what he's really willing to claim.

A standalone, fully resolved HEA. High heat, frequent and explicit intimate content throughout.

Tropes: Marriage of Convenience • Billionaire Hero • Forced Proximity • Possessive Alpha • Fake Relationship • One-Bed Trope

Heat Level: 5/5 — Explicit, frequent, graphic sexual content. 18+ only.