With a child, Dorian could never gain full control of the firm.

Without an heir, he had a legal path to court-ordered guardianship over her assets, if she could be declared incapacitated.

Linnea read the clause twice, and on the second reading she heard her grandfather’s voice in it, and had to set the paper down.

He had written this trust when she was a girl, long before Dorian, long before any of it.

She could picture him doing it — the careful old man who had built the company from a single building and who loved nothing in the world more than his granddaughter and the firm that would one day be hers.

He had put that clause in out of pure protectiveness, a grandfather’s attempt to reach across the years and shield a great-grandchild he would never meet, to make sure that no matter whom Linnea married, her own child’s birthright could never be bargained away by a spouse.