The Merger Proposal

Synopsis

My fintech is nineteen days from zero and the only thing standing between my team and the redundancy letters is the one asset money cannot buy: an old name. So I walked into the most beautiful, most broke aristocrat in the city, put a deck and a contract on his nine-hundred-year-old desk, and proposed. Marriage of convenience. Marriage of necessity. A merger sealed with a register-office signature and a watertight prenup I drafted myself, twenty-four month term, Clause 9 in bold: absolutely no feelings. He needs the wedding to keep his company. I need his name to keep mine. He thinks he holds the cards because he has the title. Cute. I hold all the cards, and I wrote them. The only line item I failed to account for is that a contract marriage you have to fake convincingly is just a real marriage with better paperwork, that his terrible cousin is hunting for proof it is a sham so she can void it and take everything, and that the icy, infuriating, falls-first man I married for tax reasons is going to make me break my own Clause 9. Enemies to lovers. She holds all the cards. For the avoidance of doubt, I am in serious trouble.