Ashley Marchetti is twenty three, broke, and one tuition payment away from losing her spot at the conservatory. So when the CFO of a billion dollar firm offers her $28,000 to put on his sister's dress and survive one dinner with an aristocratic family, she says yes.
James Hartwell doesn't do impulsive. He does spreadsheets, risk assessments, and quarterly projections. But when his half sister climbs out a hotel window forty minutes before the most important dinner of the year, he does the one thing no spreadsheet has ever recommended: he asks the pianist he finds on the mezzanine to take her place.
One dinner becomes an arrangement. The arrangement becomes ten weeks. And somewhere between the waltz lessons and the art history briefings and a hairpin commissioned in London by a man who doesn't know her real name, Ashley stops pretending — and James stops calculating.
The problem? A kind, devastatingly sincere aristocrat is falling in love with a woman who doesn't exist. And the man who invented her is falling in love with the woman who does.
The Understudy is a slow burn, high heat billionaire romance with a Cinderella twist, a Bösendorfer grand piano, and a hero who brings you water without being asked. Book 3 in The Legacy Circle series. Standalone HEA.
Genre: Romance
James Hartwell doesn't do impulsive. He does spreadsheets, risk assessments, and quarterly projections. But when his half sister climbs out a hotel window forty minutes before the most important dinner of the year, he does the one thing no spreadsheet has ever recommended: he asks the pianist he finds on the mezzanine to take her place.
One dinner becomes an arrangement. The arrangement becomes ten weeks. And somewhere between the waltz lessons and the art history briefings and a hairpin commissioned in London by a man who doesn't know her real name, Ashley stops pretending — and James stops calculating.
The problem? A kind, devastatingly sincere aristocrat is falling in love with a woman who doesn't exist. And the man who invented her is falling in love with the woman who does.
The Understudy is a slow burn, high heat billionaire romance with a Cinderella twist, a Bösendorfer grand piano, and a hero who brings you water without being asked. Book 3 in The Legacy Circle series. Standalone HEA.
Genre: Romance
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