Mr. Pride and Miss Stubborn

Rossellini Collins, twenty-three, is the youngest CEO in the city. She runs I&C Industries, answers to no one, and has hated mornings and Brooks Kingston in roughly that order since forever. Brooks Kingston, twenty-five, runs the rival Kingston Industries, looks like trouble in an expensive suit, and believes love is a scam invented by people with too much free time.

Their parents have been best friends for thirty years. Their boardrooms have been at war for about as long. And over one doomed family dinner, both families announce a decision neither of them agreed to: the two empires will be united by a wedding.

Rossellini laughs in her father's face. Brooks threatens to leave the country. The wedding happens anyway.

What follows is a marriage on paper and a prank war in practice — oil slicks on doorsteps, murdered speakers, a chocolate cake delivered knuckle-deep into the groom's face at the reception, and a husband who discovers that flirting is the most efficient way to ruin his wife's sleep. Somewhere between retaliation and stalemate, the arguing starts to feel like foreplay, and the foreplay starts to feel like something neither of them has a defense for.

Then Rossellini's secret comes for her. For six months she has been building Doc-F — a hospital robot meant to stand beside exhausted doctors through forty-bed shifts, the kind of shift that nearly killed her father — and she has told no one, not even the husband she is starting to love. When a staged server breach steals her files and a rival company launches her life's work under its own name, the scandal reaches for her assistant, her investors, and her family. Her father collapses. And when Brooks steps between Rossellini and a bullet meant for her, she does the one thing he never expected: she runs.

Two months apart teach her what the arguments at the altar never could — that a man who counts your fingers when he shakes your hand is a different species from the man who took the bullet. One long rain later, she stops running.

But peace has a short shelf life. Damien Cross, the nutcase Brooks walked away from a nine-figure deal rather than partner with, wants Doc-F — and he goes hunting for the smarter Kingston. He poaches her engineers. He files patents on her robot. He offers a fortune for what he could not steal. So Rossellini sets a trap worthy of her bloodline: a poisoned copy of Doc-F, a watermark buried in the code, and a public demo where the robot refuses, on camera, to obey the wrong order. What follows is a boardroom execution, a dream wedding planned in secret by eleven conspirators and one robot ring bearer, nine pregnancy tests that all agree, and a boy named after Mars — because his mother decided at nine years old that she would get there someday.

Mr. Pride never stopped choosing Miss Stubborn. She just needed a few years and one long rain to stop running from the choosing.

Someday, Mars. But first, this.