Grounds for Engagement

I called a billionaire a vulture in front of his whole building. Four million people watched me do it.

Josie Novak has run Ground Floor, the little coffee shop in the lobby of Chicago's old Larkin Building, for four years. She knows every regular's order. She writes a new line on the sidewalk chalkboard every morning. And she has never owed anyone a thing.

Then Graham Thayer buys the building.

He's thirty-eight, cold as the lake in January, and he wants her lobby for a luxury food hall. Her lease is in his way.

But Graham has a problem of his own. His board votes on the future of his family's company in six weeks, and his grandmother, who holds the deciding vote, wants to see him settled first.

So he makes Josie an offer. Six weeks as his fiancée, and her lease is safe.

It's only a deal. She has rules, and they're written down. She doesn't have to like him, or share one suite with him at the company retreat, or find out that the grumpiest man in the Loop is gentle with everyone who can't fight back.

What Josie doesn't know is how this deal really began. And Graham is running out of time to tell her.

Grounds for Engagement is a slow-burn standalone contemporary romance: enemies to lovers, fake engagement, forced proximity, grumpy and sunshine, a nine-year age gap, and a hero who falls first. No cheating.