Novels by Audrey Khloe

I gave the contract to the only lawyer I trusted, which was Jess's cousin Raymond, who worked at a small firm downtown. I dropped it off at his office on Wednesday morning and he called me Thursday evening and told me it was the most airtight document he had read in a long time and that whoever drafted it was very good at making sure there were no exits that hadn't been accounted for."Is it fair," I asked."It's fair to you," he said. "Everything you told me you wanted is in there. The building suspension is filed and registered. I checked it myself. It went through the city planning office yesterday morning."I sat down on the floor of my apartment when he said that. Not dramatically. My legs just decided they were done.The building was protected. In writing. Filed with the city before I had signed a single thing. He had done it before the contract was even agreed to, before he had any guarantee I would sign. I didn't know what to do with that information so I just sat on the floor

I had been to the bakery eleven times before I ever spoke to Mara Villanueva.I thought about that on the drive back to the penthouse after our meeting, sitting in the back of the car while the city woke up around me. Eleven times I had slipped away from my office, told my assistant I had a private appointment, and driven to a small bakery on the edge of a block my company was acquiring. Eleven times I had sat in the corner, ordered the same thing, and left before the morning rush started.I had never done anything like that in my life. I was not a person who had hiding places. I was not a person who needed them. My life was structured to the point where spontaneity was practically a foreign language, and yet somehow this bakery had become the one place I went when the structure got too heavy to carry.I first found it by accident fourteen months ago. I had been in the area for a site visit and my driver had taken a wrong turn and I had looked out the window and seen the light on insi

He was there at six exactly.I hadn't even finished setting up when I heard the knock at the back door, which threw me off because I hadn't told him to use the back door. I hadn't told him there was a back door. I opened it and found him standing there in a dark coat, hands in his pockets, looking completely unbothered by the early hour and the cold and the fact that he was standing in an alley behind a bakery instead of wherever billionaires normally were at six in the morning."How did you know about this entrance," I said."I've been here before," he said.I stepped back to let him in before I could think too hard about what that meant.I put coffee in front of him without asking how he took it because I didn't care how he took it and he could say something if he had a problem. He didn't say anything. He wrapped both hands around the mug and looked around the back room slowly, taking in the shelving and the proofing racks and the framed photograph of my mother near the door, the on

I laughed.It came out before I could stop it, short and sharp, the kind of laugh that has no humor in it. I looked at Dominic Ashford sitting across from me in my mother's bakery like he belonged there and I waited for him to tell me he was joking.He didn't.His expression didn't change. He just sat there, completely still, watching me process what he had said with the patience of someone who was used to waiting for rooms to catch up with him.I pushed the paper back across the table toward him."Get out of my bakery.""Hear me out first," he said."I don't need to hear you out. I need you to take your number and leave."He didn't move. He looked at the paper I had pushed toward him and then back at me and said, "Six weeks. That's all I'm asking for. A legal marriage, on paper, witnessed and documented. After six weeks we file for divorce quietly and you walk away with everything on that paper plus a settlement on top of it."I stared at him. "Why."It wasn't really a question. It c

"If you don't have the full payment by the end of the month, Miss Villanueva, we will have no choice but to proceed with the seizure." I held the phone against my ear for a few seconds after the banker finished talking, even though there was nothing left to say. Then I put it face down on the counter and stood very still in the middle of my mother's bakery, listening to the sound of the refrigerator humming and the distant noise of traffic outside and absolutely nothing else. It was a Tuesday morning. I had three customers all day. I sat down at the small table near the window, the one my mother used to sit at when she wanted to watch people walk past, and I pulled out every piece of paper I had been avoiding for two weeks. Bank statements, overdue invoices. A final utility notice I had tucked under the register and pretended I hadn't seen. I spread them all out in front of me and looked at the number at the bottom of the bank letter one more time, as if looking at it again would s