Daddy, We're Getting You a Wife

Nina Smith marries Yannick Lewis a short time after meeting him and becomes stepmother to his two children. The marriage was his idea, put to her at an arranged meeting in Landon where the two children took hold of her and called her Mom and would not be moved off it. At home she keeps her distance from him. She is also a hacker, which he knows nothing about, and the systems at his company keep failing while she is living under his roof, so she answers those attacks herself. The children are hers. She gave birth five years ago and they were taken from her then, and a paternity test settles the matter once the rest of it lines up. One woman arranged the theft and another has kept feeding the trouble since. She cuts open a rough stone at one point and it comes out imperial green. Feeling grows between her and Yannick over the same stretch, and the rest of who she is comes out a piece at a time.