Fake Bride: A Fake Marriage Billionaire Romance (Forbidden First Times Book 2) Read online

  He held out his hand for me to shake, which I did. I didn’t want to be rude, and it was just a handshake. His touch was warm and firm, but not crushing my hand like he was trying to prove a point or anything. I liked it.

  “Laird works up at the top floor,” Red said. He grinned at Laird. “How’s it treating you?”

  “Oh, y’know, same old. Christmas rush is over so we’re back to the daily grind.” I could listen to his deep voice for hours, I decided. It was just so lovely and soothing. Laird glanced at me. “Mind if I steel your new girl away for just a minute?”

  Red looked at me. “Are you comfortable with that?”

  I nodded. Being alone with a man was still something that made me nervous, but I knew that all men weren’t like Pete. And Red liked this guy, which said a lot in his favor.

  “Great.” Laird gestured for me to follow him. “Let’s talk in my office. I’ll have her back in a few minutes, Red!”

  There was an elevator that led up to the other levels on the office building. We got in and Laird immediately pressed the button for the top floor. That was the sports magazine, right? “Sorry to just spring that question on you like that. I probably could have introduced myself first, at least. I’m Laird, like Red said. Laird Hindes. I own the magazine The Trek.

  “That’s a sports magazine, right?” I asked.

  Laird grinned at me. “It sure is. And you are?”

  “I’m Trudie. I’m a barista.”

  Laird laughed. “I like someone with a sense of humor.”

  Not everyone got my dry sense of humor, and I struggled to hide a pleased smile. “So, do you usually go around proposing to random baristas to be your spouse for a few weeks or am I special?”

  Laird winked at me and my stomach melted. “You’re special.” Then he sobered up as the elevator opened and he led me out into the office area.

  Wow. This place was high end, with large offices for everyone, sports equipment sitting around for people to use, the whole nine yards. It looked like those places I’d seen in magazines, those Silicon Valley, new wave, new age kind of places that tried to make your office open air and fun, not just a soulless cubicle-crammed Hell.

  Laird’s office was the biggest, which didn’t surprise me seeing as he owned the company. “My parents are wonderful people, you have to understand that, Trudie.”

  I loved how he said my name and hated myself for loving that. I wasn’t some dewy-eyed teenager who would fall for a handsome guy with a cool accent. I had learned my lesson with Pete and I was going to keep my distance.

  “They’re wonderful, but they’re meddling.” Laird gestured for me to sit and then walked over to a water dispenser machine, pouring us both a cup. “And they will not leave me alone about getting a girlfriend. Neither will the rest of my family. They all think that I’m lonely for some reason, that my friends aren’t enough and I need a romantic partner. Antiquated notion, I know, but there you have it. So my cousins are being the way they are, and my parents apparently just blurted out that I wasn’t the lonesome bachelor they all supposed but was, in fact, married.”

  He spoke with this air of sophistication that made me feel like I really was some backwaters girl from a small town in the middle of nowhere. I was a barista, for crying out loud, and this guy owned a popular magazine. He spoke like he’d gone to an Ivy League school. What would he want me for, of all the people he could get to help him?

  “Now, normally I could fake it from afar, and then pretend I got a divorce or something, but my favorite cousin is getting married next week and they’re all expecting me to bring my wife. It’s far too fast for me to fake a divorce, and besides, I don’t want to have to fake being devastated and sad when it’s supposed to be my cousin’s big day. This is about the couple getting married, I don’t want to steal the show. Which means I need to find someone to pretend to be my loving spouse for a few weeks.” He paused. “And that’s where you come in.”

  This sounded like a lively and tight-knit family, completely the opposite of what I knew. Both my grandparents had been dead before I was born, and my parents had no siblings, so when they’d died, I’d been all alone in the world. I hadn’t grown up with big family reunions, or playing with cousins at the holidays, or being spoiled by grandparents. A part of me yearned for that kind of family, echoing like a scream in an empty cavern.

  “What do you say?” Laird asked. “Would you mind a vacation to Ireland?”

  I really shouldn’t do this. I had just gotten myself out of trouble, and there were so many ways this could go wrong. The right thing for me to do would be to keep my head down and avoid any insane nonsense like, you know, pretending to be someone’s wife.

  But at the same time… Ireland was about as far away from New Mexico as you could get. And it would be a chance to see a part of the world that I hadn’t a hope of seeing otherwise. When else would I get the money to travel somewhere? And Laird did seem nice… but then, so had Pete at first…

  I knew I shouldn’t do this. But I found myself opening my mouth and saying anyway, “What’s in it for me?”

  2

  Laird

  The smart thing, of course, would’ve been to ask a friend of mine to pretend to be my wife, since that friend would know me and I’d be comfortable with her. And I had no shortage of female friends. Problem was that I was well aware—or my brother Liam had made me well aware—that most of my friends who were women were hoping I would come to see them as more than friends, and I didn’t want to hurt them by putting them in a position of false hope.

  I could’ve hired an escort or someone of that sort, but I worried about someone in my nosey family doing a background check and finding out the truth about her profession and then it would all be a mess. My family would’ve lost their minds.

  Still, I could’ve interviewed people and found someone. That was the sort of thing I had an assistant for. But I had seen this woman, Trudie, working the till the last week at Buzz when I’d come in to grab a coffee on my way to work and I just couldn’t help myself. She was gorgeous, with these warm hazel eyes and this soft smile that left me breathless.

  I was a bit surprised, and yet not surprised at all, to hear her ask what was in it for her. I was asking for something pretty unusual, and I was a total stranger to her. At the same time, it felt a bit mercenary for my tastes. But that wasn’t the problem. I wasn’t trying to actually date the woman, I was trying to get someone to play a part for a few weeks. And I didn’t know what kind of financial straits she might be in.

  “How about fifty thousand dollars?” I offered.

  Trudie’s eyes got a little wide, and I had a feeling that I had made too high of an offer, far more than she had been expecting. She looked to be in her mid-twenties so I had assumed she had bad student loan debt, like everyone else, but either she didn’t have a debt that large, or she hadn’t been expecting me to offer such a high sum. Either way, though, I’d said it, and I couldn’t take it back now. Besides, I could handle fifty thousand, no problem.

  “I, um, well, that’s very… generous, um, thank you.” She seemed to retreat into herself, the smiling, lovely woman I had gotten used to over the last week shrinking almost, becoming a completely different person.

  “Not a problem,” I replied. Honestly, I’d pay her twice that much if it meant I got my family off my back. I still wasn’t speaking to my parents, or Liam, after this whole mess. How hard was it to just be honest and not lie about your son’s marital status? I was genuinely still confused as to how the bloody hell they’d made this mess for me.

  And Liam—Liam was being no help at all. Of course he wasn’t. When had he ever been a help? And he was still in the honeymoon phase with that darling new wife of his, the sports reporter.

  I was only 36, for Christ’s sake, I wasn’t dying. I could take my time finding the right person to spend the rest of my life with. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was some trick on the part of my parents to get me to propose to whatever girl
I might be seeing, or at least start seeing someone and take dating seriously.

  Trudie chewed on her lip, apparently a nervous habit. She was clutching her water cup in her hand but not drinking from it. “May I take some time to think about it?” she asked. “I just moved here and got settled, so leaving for a few weeks might be a lot.”

  “Understandable.” I grabbed my business card from the neat little rack on my desk and quickly wrote my personal mobile number on the back. I didn’t normally give out that kind of thing willy-nilly but I doubted this woman would take advantage of it. She didn’t even seem to know who I was. “You can text or call me anytime, I always have my mobile on me.”

  “Oh, thank you.” Trudie took the card and put it in her pocket. “I’ll let you know—I won’t make you wait too long for an answer. I know you’ve got to find someone. This is just… a lot.”

  “No worries.” I held the door open for her as she left. As she walked past me to get through the door, I got a whiff of her shampoo, something light and fruity. My stomach clenched with heat.

  Down, boy. If I was going to be pretending to be in a relationship with this woman then I couldn’t go around having inappropriate thoughts about her. Even if she was absolutely stunning. The kind of sweet, curvy woman I’d normally totally hit up.

  As Trudie walked away, Jack, my CFO and right-hand man, walked over to me. He raised his eyebrows in a knowing way and I rolled my eyes. “Don’t even start.”

  “She’s exactly your type.”

  “Of course she is, I had to pick someone my type so my cousins would believe me.”

  “So you’re really going for it?” Jack shook his head in disbelief. “You’re really, seriously going to bring a fake wife to your cousin’s wedding.”

  “What else am I supposed to do? Tell everyone that my parents lied? Nobody will believe me that my parents were the ones who lied to them, they’ll think I’m lying and hiding my wife from them for some reason and it’ll be this big dramatic thing. Easier to just—bring her, then avoid mentioning her for a few months, and then say we got a divorce. Ta-da.”

  “Right. Any reason why she looked like she’d been backed over by a truck?”

  “I… might have blown it when I asked her… I just walked up to her and asked her to be my wife.” I grimaced, an embarrassed shudder running through me. Could I have been any more bloody ridiculous?

  Jack barked out a laugh. “Oh my God, that’s hilarious. And she just went with it?”

  “I think she thinks I’m a looney,” I replied. “But she said she’d think about it. And I offered her payment. I think she’s hard up.” Trudie looked like she hadn’t eaten properly in months.

  “All right.” Jack was grinning like a maniac. “It’s your funeral though.”

  I glared at him. “I can handle this.”

  “You can’t even chat up a woman in a bar, Laird, how you’re going to pretend to be married to someone for weeks, I don’t know.”

  The fucking annoying thing was, he had a point. The bastard. I always got tongue tied around pretty women. It had been that way my whole life. I had money, I was successful, I owned my own business, and I wasn’t too bad-looking if I could say so myself. You’d think this would give me some kind of bloody confidence but oh no, every time I walked up to a woman, I completely lost my nerve. What was I even supposed to say to be suave? I hadn’t the faintest clue.

  Jack, on the other hand, always knew what to say to women to get them falling at his feet. It was absolute insanity. Which was why I was skeptical when Liam assured me that I had women with crushes on me and to ‘tread carefully’ when it came to my friends who were women. How the fuck could a woman have a crush on me when all I did was trip over my own sentences around them?

  “You could try just talking business with her,” Jack chuckled, finding this whole fucking thing hilarious because of course he did. “You’re pretty good at that.”

  “Why am I friends with you again?” I asked him.

  “Because I’m entertaining and I keep you humble,” Jack replied immediately. He put his arm around my shoulders and walked me towards the elevator. “C’mon, it’s late, you should be out relaxing. She’ll call you and take the deal.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Trust me on this. She’ll take it.”

  I wasn’t so sure, though. I was a complete stranger to her. I could be whisking her off to the backwoods to murder her for all that she knew. Had I just blown my chance?

  3

  Trudie

  I lay in bed, staring up at the business card for Laird Hindes. That was a hell of an Irish name, all right. All around me my roommates were chatting, and I longed for a place of my own. Fifty thousand dollars could get me that. Fifty thousand dollars could get my information wiped clean, could get me a new legal name, could get me whatever I wanted to keep Pete away from me forever. A lawyer for a restraining order even, if I wanted it. I could truly start over instead of looking over my shoulder all the time.

  But what about the risk? Going away with a man I didn’t know? Red seemed to think it was a good idea. He’d sounded like he’d cracked a rib, he laughed so hard when I told him what Laird had said. “You should do it! It’ll be a blast, Laird’s a good guy and you’ll get to see Ireland!”

  I hadn’t seen it that way. Of course, yes, those were all true things and I trusted Red’s assessment of Laird but… this was mad. This was absolute insanity. To pretend to be someone’s wife when I hadn’t even known him until now?

  I played with my hair. My blonde hair. If I had fifty thousand dollars to start over, I could go back to my natural brunette.

  One of my roommates raised her voice and I winced. It sure would be nice to have a place of my own. This co-op was better than staying with Pete. I wasn’t scared of my roommates or frantic about what to do if they came home and things weren’t exactly the way that they liked them. But living with these many people and having no personal space was pretty annoying too.

  Ugh. What to do?

  The thought haunted me all night, and in the morning. I barely slept. I dragged myself out of bed before my alarm, giving up on the whole sleep thing, and hey, silver lining! It meant there was only one person ahead of me in line for the shower.

  When I got into work, Red was grinning at me. “Oh, shut up,” I told him, rolling my eyes and putting on my apron. “I haven’t said yes, yet.”

  “Mmm, no, but you could do a lot worse than say yes,” Red pointed out. “It could be fun. Be spontaneous!”

  “I can’t afford to be spontaneous.”

  “You’ll still have your job when you get back, I promise. We won’t fire you.”

  “I’m not listening!” I told him, going over to the coffee machine to refill it.

  Standing at the counter was a tall man with curly brown hair, looking at me very intensely. Like he was sizing me up. I tried to ignore him, even as a swoop of fear hit my stomach. What if Pete had hired a private detective to find me? What if this was that detective and he was going to tell Pete where I was and…

  The guy was still staring at me once I finished filling the machine. I set the bag of coffee down and turned around. “What, are you going to propose to me too?” I snapped.

  The moment I said it I clapped my hand over my mouth, horrified at myself. I shouldn’t have talked to a customer that way! I could get in huge trouble!

  The guy, however, just laughed. “Oh, you’re feisty, that’s good, he likes that. And you’ll need it to hold your own with his crazy relatives.” The guy held out his hand. “Sorry, I’m almost as shit at introductions as Laird is. I’m Jack, Laird’s best friend and a quarter of his impulse control.”

  “Oh.” I shook Jack’s hand automatically. “Um. Hello.” I thought I might’ve seen him on my way out the door last night but I hadn’t been sure. “I’m still thinking about it. I don’t have an answer yet.”

  “Oh, Laird didn’t send me. I just wanted to check you out for myself
. But that’s good.” Jack nodded. “I’d be suspicious of you if you just jumped on the money right away.”

  “Plenty of people could use money like that, I wouldn’t blame them if they did,” I replied.

  Jack looked surprised by my response. I plowed forward before I could let him interrupt me, so that I could explain myself better.

  “If someone had bad student loans, or bad tax debt, or had a kid and was desperate to look after them—or what if a relative just died? Funeral bills are astronomical.” I’d learned that when Mom had passed. It had been terrifying and I’d had to drop out of college in order to work full-time to pay for everything. It was that or have my Mom not get a proper funeral which, apparently, you could get fined for by the government if you didn’t bury someone properly? It was insane. “Laird seems like a nice guy. Red vouches for him. So why wouldn’t someone jump at the chance to have all their problems solved?”

  Jack looked sufficiently chastised, but there was also a twinkle in his eye. “I like you,” he announced. “Keep that sass, you’ll need it to deal with Laird’s family.”

  “I… I wouldn’t say that I’m sassy…”

  “A strong backbone, then,” Jack said. “Laird’s family won’t let you get a word in edgewise if you don’t fight for it, so definitely keep a hold of that.”

  I didn’t really see myself as having a strong backbone. I stayed with Pete for far too long. I jumped at every shadow. How could I possibly have a strong backbone for simply pointing out why he shouldn’t judge someone if they had jumped at the money? I was just trying to be fair.

  Jack, though, seemed impressed with me.

  “You can’t give me advice when I haven’t even said yes yet,” I pointed out.

  Jack shook his head, smiling. “I hope you say yes, though. I can see why Laird picked you. Do you need me to wax poetic about how gorgeous Ireland is? Or how great the alcohol is?”