Ten years before I ever met Flynn, my grandfather had established the Ashcombe Irrevocable Governance Trust.

It was not a small thing.

It was a vast, deliberately dormant family estate, built by a man who had spent his life in the machinery of finance and understood, better than anyone I have known, how wealth is truly kept and how it is truly lost.

He built it to protect my future, in a form no husband and no court could easily reach.

And when I told him I was going to marry Flynn Locke, my grandfather — who distrusted charming, ambitious men the way other people distrust thin ice — did one more thing.