Miles held up a finger. “I’m not doing anything illegal, unethical, or humiliating.”
Parker laughed. “Miles, it’s marriage. It’s already unethical.”
Miles ignored him and tapped the phone screen with a single finger. Tessa Hart’s face froze in his mind, not pretty in the polished way he was used to, but real in a way that felt… dangerous.
“Arrange it,” he said.
And that was how a joke began to take the shape of a blade.
Tessa Hart lived in a world Miles had only ever flown over.
She ran the Hart Foundation in a river town in upstate New York called Marrow Glen, where the brick buildings were old and the winters had teeth. People knew each other’s dogs’ names. They held doors open. They waved without needing a reason.
When Miles first walked into her office, he brought the city with him: expensive cologne, expensive calm, expensive certainty.
The office smelled like coffee and paper and hand sanitizer. Bulletin boards crowded the walls. Photos of kids holding certificates, grandmothers learning to use laptops, volunteers stacking boxes.
Tessa stood behind a desk covered in donor letters and sticky notes. She wore a simple navy sweater and jeans. Her hair was twisted into a bun that wasn’t trying to be fashionable, just practical. Her body was full, unapologetically so, and Miles noticed immediately how the world had likely trained itself to underestimate her.
