by Julie Murphy
Part of Meant to Be
First published 2025
Fa Mulan runs the day-to-day operations of her father's hedge fund and knows how to hold her own in a room full of finance bros. When Fa Zhou falls ill mid-acquisition, she refuses to let the deal collapse. The target company is a family-run whiskey brand, old-fashioned in every sense, and its gatekeepers will only do business with Fa Zhou himself. So Mulan borrows his name and steps into his shoes. One email becomes a phone call, and one phone call becomes a face-to-face meeting, and before she can find an exit, she is packed off to a week-long retreat at a cattle ranch run by the focused and quietly compelling Shang. Now she has to wrangle livestock, throw axes, learn to butcher, and convince an entire skeptical family that she is the powerful CEO they have been emailing for months. The deception gets harder every day. So does ignoring what she feels every time Shang looks at her. Mulan wants to close the deal and make her father proud. She did not plan on also trying not to fall in love.
Genres: romance, contemporary, adult, adult-fiction, comedy, contemporary-romance
Vibes: charming, heartwarming, humorous, romantic-tension, witty
Tropes: deception, enemies-to-lovers, fake-dating, fish-out-of-water, forced-proximity
Setting: cattle ranch, hedge fund
278 pages · Paperback · Hyperion Avenue