The cork slides into place with a soft, final sound. Izzy presses her thumb against it, testing. Her hands are too small to push it all the way, and the bottle was her mother's favourite - the last one left from the 2003, which was a good year for the vineyard and a bad one for everything else.
She is eleven. The vineyard has nine years left, and nobody has told her that yet.
The note in the bottle is not discovered for two decades, which is exactly as long as it takes for the situation it describes to become unavoidable.
Damon arrives as a buyer. That is the entire relationship and both parties are satisfied with the description for approximately four days.
The fake fiancée contract is his idea and Izzy's terms. She is better at contracts than he expected, which he mentions once, in the tone of a man revising an estimate upward and finding the process unfamiliar.
There is a price on vintage that the market does not set. There is a dinner bell that means something specific in this valley. There is a frost sensor that fails on the worst possible night, and a stolen grape festival where a hundred years of neighbourly resentment gets settled badly and publicly.
There is an oak tree, and a promise made under it, and a varietal that should not exist.
*You found a buyer. You found me.*
*That's right.*
*And then you lied to me too.*
She blinks. *What are you talking about? You told me the vine-*
She steps forward, takes the front of his shirt in her fist, and kisses him. The crowd erupts. Somebody cheers. Reyes laughs and claps him on the back hard enough to stagger him.
Promised by the CEO is a revenge billionaire romance of fake engagements and real contracts, a heroine who out-negotiates everybody in the valley, a buyer who came for the land and stayed for the argument, a century of neighbourly grudges, and a guaranteed happily ever after.
