Trading my fiance for his billionaire uncle

Isla Bennett was staring at the same page of a legal file she had read four times already.The words weren't going in. Her brain kept wandering to the florist, the caterer, the seating chart she still hadn't finished. Her wedding was in three days. Three days.But here she was, still at her desk at nine pm, cold coffee by her elbow, trying to win a court case against a company run by a man she'd never even met.Damien Cross.She'd heard the name a hundred times in the past six months. Self-made billionaire. Built Cross Industries from nothing. The kind of man who walked into a room and made everyone else feel smaller. Her firm, Sterling & Wade, was trying to stop him from buying out a smaller company in what they called an illegal merger.Isla had built the whole case herself. Every document, every argument, every piece of evidence had passed through her hands.She thought she knew every inch of this case.She was wrong."You look like death," Jordan Price announced, appearing in her

Isla's phone was making a sound like a fire alarm.She grabbed it, squinting at the screen. Fifty-one notifications. No, fifty-eight. The number kept climbing."Yeah." Jordan appeared in the doorway of his guest room, holding two mugs of coffee. "You're trending. Number two in New York."She'd made it to his apartment around two in the morning. He'd taken one look at her, smudged mascara, champagne-stained dress, shoes in her hand, and pointed wordlessly at the guest room. No questions. That was thirteen years of friendship.She sat up and took the coffee like a lifeline. "How bad?""Page Six says 'Jilted Lawyer Kisses Billionaire Enemy at Charity Gala." Jordan scrolled his phone. "Business Insider is going with 'Conflict of Interest Raises Questions About Donovan Merger Case.'" He made a face. "That one's going to sting.""Catherine.""Called six times. Her emails have the subject line: MY OFFICE. 8 AM. All caps."Isla's stomach tightened. She set down her coffee before she spilled

Saturday morning. Jordan's apartment. Four hundred and twelve social media notifications.Isla had stopped counting.She was sitting cross-legged on the guest bed surrounded by the three hundred pages of reading material Damien had sent over, a highlighter in her hand and a half-eaten piece of toast going cold beside her. She'd been awake since five.She was smiling."That's not normal," Jordan said from the doorway."What?""You're reading utility company contracts and smiling. At eight in the morning. Two days after your fiancé cheated on you.""Ex-fiancé." She circled a clause in the document. "And these are fascinating. Do you know how old some of these union agreements are? There's a labor provision in here that was written before I was born. Cross's team wants to convert this company to solar power but they can't just…..""Isla.""....restructure the workforce without renegotiating half these contracts which means….""Isla." Jordan crossed his arms. "You are happy. Genuinely, a

Isla didn't sleep, and she didn't pretend to try.By five in the morning she'd read the memo eleven times. By six, she'd printed it, laid it flat on her kitchen table under the light, and gone through it the way she went through every piece of evidence in her career: line by line, looking for the crack that would tell her whether it was real.There wasn't one. The letterhead was correct. The formatting matched internal Cross Industries templates she'd already seen in the case files. The signature, small, slanted, impatient, looked exactly like the one on the employment contract sitting in her bag.*Use Marcus Webb. Create a situation where she publicly embarrasses herself. Ensure she's removed from the case.*She'd built her whole life on the belief that if she worked hard enough, was careful enough, she could not be made a fool of. And here was proof, dated six months ago, that she'd been a target before she'd ever known Damien Cross's face.Her phone buzzed. Damien: Car's downstairs