ThE WIDOWER'S BARGAIN: An Age-Gap Grumpy Fake Fiancé Romance, (Paperback)

<p><b>Three weeks after burying her father, Clara Beaumont came home to discover her inheritance came with a deadline - and a stranger willing to pretend to marry her to save it.</b></p><p>Clara was supposed to scatter her father's ashes, lock up the vineyard, and disappear back to her San Francisco life. Instead she finds a clause buried in her grandmother's marital retention agreement: the land passes to a contingent trust on her thirtieth birthday unless she is <i>married</i>. She has twenty-eight months. The estate has six months of operating capital. And the only people who can help are circling like the salt wind off the cove - neighbors with cash offers, a council member with a grudge against her family, and a stranger she has never met.</p><p>His name is Rowan Vale. He owns Vale Maritime three miles up the headland, and he has, it turns out, been quietly paying her father's creditors for nine years. He sits across her grandmother's kitchen island the second time they meet, lays out a fake engagement on a chipped legal pad, and asks her for two things: <i>time, and the room to be wrong about her.</i></p><p>Clara writes eight rules. He signs all eight.</p><p>Then they have to learn how to <i>perform.</i></p><p>A charity auction at the Driftwood. A weekend at a coastal inn with one room available. A grant interview that requires them to look like a couple who has, somehow, fallen in love. The space between her hand at the small of his back and what she is supposed to feel narrows by <i>centimeters</i> over a single restrained, devastating summer - until a council vote, an anonymous tip to the local press, and a letter in pencil from her dying father force them both to choose what is real.</p><p><b>Inside you'll find: </b></p><ul><li>An <b>age-gap, grumpy, fake-fiancé</b> romance that earns every centimeter of its slow burn</li><li>A heroine with <b>fire</b>, a tongue, and a Stanford degree she will absolutely deploy against you</li><li>A widower hero who has not let himself want anything in <i>a decade</i> - and a woman who reads him like a balance sheet</li><li>A small <b>Pacific Northwest</b> town with gossip, ghosts, and a vineyard that may not survive</li><li><b>One</b> room. <b>One</b> harbor permit at stake. <b>One</b> letter that breaks them both open</li><li>A literary, restrained, <i>quietly devastating</i> love story with a happily-ever-after that has to be <b>earned</b></li></ul><p><br>For readers who want a romance that takes its time. For readers who notice the difference between two people who are pretending and two people who have stopped pretending without knowing it. For readers who have been waiting for an age-gap fake-fiancé romance that takes its characters seriously, takes its slow burn at face value, and takes them somewhere <i>real.</i></p><p><i><b>Some bargains are made twice. The second time, you mean it.</b></i></p><p><b>One-click and step inside Beaumont House - t</b></p>

• ThE WIDOWER'S BARGAIN: An Age-Gap Grumpy Fake Fiancé Romance, (Paperback)
• Author: Independently Published
• ISBN: 9798197044778
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-05-15
• Page Count: 208