RIVAL FOUNDATIONS

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Synopsis

Sienna Marlowe inherited more than a struggling architecture firm when her father died. She inherited his hatred for the Cross name. Three years ago, Cross Holdings swallowed Solomon Marlowe's biggest contract out from under him in a deal so cutthroat it broke him, in more ways than one. Now the city's most coveted project, the restoration of the historic Whitmore Theater, has come up for bid, and Sienna intends to win it in her father's name. She does not expect her only real competition to be Damian Cross, the son of the man who ruined her father, and the new face of the empire she has spent three years despising from a distance. When the Landmark Preservation Committee announces that neither firm qualifies alone and forces the two of them into an uneasy joint venture, Sienna is left with an impossible choice: walk away from the project of a lifetime, or share a drafting table with the enemy. Damian has his own reasons for wanting the Whitmore. He is trying to build something his father cannot touch, and he needs Sienna's talent, and her family name, to do it. What he does not expect is how hard it becomes to remember why he is supposed to dislike her. As deadlines tighten and old wounds surface, the two of them are forced to work side by side under the theater's crumbling dome, trading insults that grow softer, and glances that linger longer than either of them intends. But some foundations were built to keep people out, not bring people together, and the truth about what really happened three years ago is about to test whether anything they are building can survive it.