Black Ties and White Lies

Kat Singleton published Black Ties and White Lies independently in 2023, one of a run of contemporary romance novels the author writes in and around the world of wealthy families and the staff who work for them. The story is a complete standalone rather than a book in a sequence, and it is built on the fake-relationship premise that the subgenre uses to put two people into a formal commitment long before either of them is ready for an informal one.

Beckham Sinclair is the executive the city's newspapers describe as its most eligible bachelor, and he is written as a man who has learned to manage coverage the way he manages a board. The designer he hires has a history with the Sinclair family that she has been carefully not talking about, and agreeing to the charade means working in his office, travelling on his plane and answering questions from a press corps that treats the engagement as a corporate event. The two of them have one professional reason after another to be in the same room, which is the whole architecture of the book.

Singleton's fiction sits in the corner of contemporary romance where the money is very large, the work is real, and the emotional difficulty comes from what the characters have decided not to say. It contains explicit sex and the usual warnings for the subgenre. Look for it beside the billionaire romances rather than the small-town shelf.