Product Description
She had a satisfying six-year plan. He showed up with a sketch on a cocktail napkin.Tess Lindqvist is one project away from making partner at Houston's most prestigious architecture firm. The project: a $400 million cultural campus on Galveston Island, commissioned by a billionaire widow who wants love made permanent in steel and stone. Tess has prepared for everything—except Owen Moreau. He's the rival who stole a commission from her two years ago, the man she argued with so memorably at an industry gala that both their offices still talk about it, and now he's her competition for the biggest bid of her career. When their client mistakes their charged bickering for passion and announces how moved she is that an engaged couple will design her late husband's legacy, neither of them corrects her. The competing team is standing six feet away. The lie takes root—and both their firms make sure it grows.Now Tess and Owen have four weeks on a Gulf Coast estate, one tiny guest cottage with one bed, and a shared studio where their clashing design philosophies start producing the best work either of them has ever done. She's clean lines and controlled palettes. He's organic forms and napkin sketches. She plans in quarter-year increments. He wings it and makes you believe it was the plan all along. They're supposed to be faking it for the client. The problem is that the fake version of them—the one that argues over cantilever ratios by day and reaches for each other's hands at dinner—is starting to feel like the real thing.When the deception begins to crack, what's at stake isn't the contract. It's whether two people who built their lives around never being vulnerable can survive letting someone see the unfinished version of who they really are.Perfect for fans of Sally Thorne and Ali Hazelwood. Read more
