THE SUMMER ARRANGEMENT

Sloane Calloway built a career making other people’s events look effortless. She can fix a seating chart in real time, charm a vendor who’s threatening to walk, and keep her face perfectly neutral when a bride changes the entire timeline forty-eight hours before the rehearsal dinner. She’s very good at managing other people’s disasters.

Then her ex-boyfriend posts an Instagram story from her family’s Memorial Day beach house weekend with his new girlfriend, who is objectively stunning and somehow also a pediatric surgeon.

Enter Weston Cole: Boston billionaire, private equity CEO, currently trending for all the wrong reasons after a Forbes profile made him look like a heartless corporate raider. His PR team thinks a charming holiday weekend could rehabilitate his image. Sloane needs someone credible enough to survive the weekend without sympathetic head-tilts. They shake hands Thursday afternoon. The arrangement lasts exactly seventy-two hours.

Except before the fighting turns into something neither of them planned — there’s the three-hour drive to the Cape where he’s annotated a briefing document about her family in the margins like he’s studying for an exam, a shared bedroom because her mother assumed they were serious and backing out would raise questions, late nights on the back porch where the performance slips and the conversations get dangerously real, his hand at the small of her back during the family photo that stays three seconds longer than it needed to, her niece deciding he’s her favorite person and showing him her rock collection with the kind of trust kids reserve for people who are safe, and the moment on the dock Sunday morning when he tells her a true thing he’s never said out loud and she realizes she’s been performing fine for so long she forgot what wanting something actually feels like.

She’s spent years managing everyone’s comfort at the expense of her own, saying yes when she means no, shrinking herself because being easy felt safer than asking for more. He’s spent his whole life inside a gospel of efficiency and emotional restraint because admitting he’s lonely would mean admitting the empire he built isn’t enough. A holiday weekend in a house that smells like sunscreen and slightly damp towels is about to unravel both of them.

Contemporary billionaire romance where the fake relationship ends and the real one starts before either of them notices. The kind of book you start poolside and finish in the bathroom at 1am because you need to know if he shows up.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Billionaires & Millionaires sits at 9.5 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 411 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — the billionaire + fake relationship trope stack is proven at bestseller levels (Black Ties and White Lies held top-100 with nearly identical trope DNA)

→ Dual-category play with Romance > Workplace (8.6 sales-to-comp, Hot Mainstream) gives legitimate positioning in two high-volume categories simultaneously

→ Memorial Day beach house setting unlocks seasonal Holidays category entry (29.2 sales-to-comp) in an underpopulated window — captures holiday-adjacent discoverability without Christmas saturation

→ Fake relationship is social-share optimized — consistently one of the most-shared tropes on BookTok and romance Instagram

→ 72-hour compressed timeline creates urgency that long-game fake relationships can’t replicate — the forced proximity pressure cooker mirrors Love Hard (BSL #56)

→ Dual-category positioning enables Romantic Comedy crossover as an unlisted fourth category benefit

TROPES:

• Fake relationship
• Billionaire
• Forced proximity
• Grumpy/sunshine
• Opposites attract
• CEO hero
• Only one bed
• Holiday setting

HEAT LEVEL: Open Door / Steamy

Perfect for fans of: Kat Singleton, Elsie Silver, Becka Mack, and Sarah Adams