My sister gasped.

“You told my parents your firm was expanding across the region!” “That was the expansion plan,” Spencer muttered.

“Then what happened?”

Bernard Ashby turned a pleading gaze back toward Rafael.

“Moreno Global’s private equity arm was reviewing our file to enter as a primary strategic buyout investor.”

And my sister finally understood.

She had not married into an unstoppable financial empire.

She had married into a family that desperately needed a multi-million-dollar lifeline to keep its doors open — and that lifeline, it now turned out, ran directly through the man whose jacket was draped around my wine-stained shoulders.