Frost

Ava grew up fae in a world that never fully accepted her: mocked by humans, and shut out by the fae who share her blood. On her birthday she finds her boyfriend in bed with someone else. By the end of the night she is drunk and mouthing off to a stranger in a bar.

That stranger turns out to be Torin, the Seelie King. His kingdom is locked in a killing winter and running short on food. Once every generation its king must marry, and this is the year. Torin offers Ava fifty million dollars to pose as his intended through the trials that choose his bride, with no real wedding at the end of it.

The trials are not staged for cameras only. The competition for queen turns dangerous, and losing does not simply mean going home. Torin is carrying an older problem too: a curse that means genuinely loving anyone would kill them. What is supposed to be a business arrangement between two people who agree to feel nothing keeps slipping into something neither of them signed up for.

Frost opens the Frost and Nectar series. It is a paranormal romance built on enemies-to-lovers tension, a fake-engagement premise and a tournament with real casualties. The romance is a slow burn, developing across the trials rather than settled in the first chapters. The marriage-of-convenience setup carries most of the early tension.