Naomi Hale felt that they were through the tough stuff.The jobs were secure. The business was standing firm. And somewhere amid the broken machinery, the crazy figures, and too many late nights, Gabriel Ward became someone she did not intend to become, someone whom she could trust.But now comes summer.The business collapses, salaries rise, and the pledges made to save thirty-one jobs start to unravel. Naomi must consider the chance that to save her people, she will ...

Mexico means Esteban Vargas, who is patient in a way Marcus hasn't encountered before, a man who built an empire slowly enough that nobody ever watched it happen. The lesson Vargas teaches, without intending to, is that patience is a weapon. Marcus absorbs it. He also meets Danny Ruiz and watches Danny fall in love with Vargas's daughter Lucia across a series of letters that take three years to reach their conclusion. Danny learns to wait for something real. Marcus watches and does...

Marcus Vale has crossed another border. This time, the operation waiting for him is older than anything he has built.

While Ward Capital purchases sixty percent of the restaurant chain Naomi Hale has labored for nine years to build, Naomi expects spreadsheets, firings, and strangers who view numbers where she sees people.Then Gabriel Ward shows up at the door.Charming, privileged, and fatally easy to like, Gabriel has been dispatched to familiarize himself with the business before his family makes its decision regarding the future of their new acquisition. Naomi becomes Gabriel's unwilling...

Marcus Vale is twenty-six years old, broke, and out of options. His mother's medication costs more than his job pays, and a man named Hector Ruiz has a napkin with a diagram on it. The arrangement is simple. The corner in Astoria runs clean, nobody gets hurt, and the money actually works.Marcus is good at it. That's the problem. He's good at the organizing, the systems, the logic of keeping everything from touching everything else. By the time he understand...