What if the ticket out of war meant marrying a stranger - and the stranger wanted more than company?

Natalia Kravchenko is twenty-two, sharp-tongued, and fiercely proud. When a late-night phone call offers an improbable way out of bomb-scarred Kyiv - one marriage, one visa, one chance to save her ailing mother - she agrees with the cool arithmetic of survival. The man is Alexander Prescott: sixty-six, wealthy, and exquisitely bored with the trophies of his life. What begins as a marriage of convenience soon becomes a dangerous, beautiful experiment in power, pride, and love.

From glittering expatriate receptions and humiliating tabloid flashes to the fluorescent glare of immigration hearings and the quiet vigilance of a hospital waiting room, Natalia must learn the hard currency of a new world. She studies English with a stubborn teacher, trains with an acting coach who sees her, and earns small triumphs on stage and screen. But every step forward-every review, every audition-arrives under the shadow of an old question: is she a talented woman forging a career, or merely a rumor wrapped in the sheen of a billionaire romance?

A fierce, transportive contemporary romance about agency, scandal, and the quiet bravery of choosing love every day.

Natalia's story explores the collision between survival and selfhood: immigrant life and cultural displacement, the moral complications of a May-December relationship, and the cost of reinvention when fame and leverage stand at odds with dignity. Along the way she finds allies-Sofia, a pragmatic assistant; Luca, a coach who teaches her to use broken English as truth; Maya, a co-star who shields and challenges her-and an adversary who forces the truth into public view. As the press tightens and a family legacy fractures, Natalia must decide whether to lean into a life bought for survival or to fight for a life she builds by her own labor.

Perfect for readers who love marriage-of-convenience romance, billionaire love stories, and character-driven women's fiction. If you read Jojo Moyes and Kristin Hannah for emotional stakes and moral complexity, Married to the Money will keep you turning pages - and thinking long after the last line.

Themes & elements: marriage of convenience romance