The Billionaire’s Fake Marriage: (Crystal Beach Resort Standalone Series)
The Billionaire’s Fake Marriage
(Crystal Beach Resort Standalone Series)
Hanna Hart
Copyright ©2018 by Hanna Hart - All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
About the Author
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Chapter One
Riley
Riley was just about to end her shift. She’d kept the restaurant open for an extra hour to sit and talk with her favorite customer, Gabriella. The girl who always stayed late and always drank a copious amount of coffee for it being after midnight.
“Closing up? Gabriella asked.
Riley worked as a waitress at Mug’s Coffee House. A poorly named local diner that was open until midnight. The owner had intended for it to be a hip café, with its young barnboard walls and wrought-iron décor, but it seemed to appeal to local truckers as much as it did to students.
It was ten past one in the morning, and Gabriella was Riley’s last customer.
"Yep,” Riley said with a sharp intake of breath, loading the pie plate and empty coffee cup onto her forearm. "For five luxurious hours and then we open for breakfast.”
“Wow,” Gabriella laughed, flipping her dark hair behind her shoulders. “Live it up, girl.”
Riley rolled her eyes playfully and nodded her thanks to the girl.
“Got any plans?” the twenty-something woman asked, following Riley to the counter and pulling out her wallet.
“At one?” Riley snorted, tossing the dirty dishes into a rubber bin and feeding it through the window to the kitchen. “Yeah, I’m ready to party, can’t you tell?” she laughed, gesturing toward her coffee-stained apron.
“Come out with me!” Gabriella insisted, nearly bouncing in her chair.
The two had become something like friends over the four years that Gabriella had been coming into Mugs. They had gone out together on a few occasions but weren’t exactly girlfriends.
“Can’t,” Riley shrugged.
“Why, you have a date?”
Before Riley had the chance to answer, Gabriella smacked both her hands on the counter. “Oh!” she said with a drawn-out tone that implicated they were about to get into some serious girl-talk. “She’s ready to move on, already! Spill! Tell me everything!”
“No!” Riley yelped and could feel her face go hot. She was far from ready to move on.
She’d only been single for two years and divorced for less than one. While that might seem like a long time to some, it wasn’t nearly long enough to get over Joshua.
“Riley,” Gabriella said, widening her heavily made-up eyes. “It’s been too long!” she enunciated. “It’s time to get back out there. I know the perfect guy for you if you don’t mind putting up with a little B.S.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’m done with B.S. for now,” she laughed.
“Then forget about guys!”
“Can we, please?”
“You need a girls’ night,” her customer said with a sudden grin.
“I’m having one,” Riley said, turning to face the woman. “With my daughter.”
“A three-year-old cannot party like a twenty-five-year old at one in the morning, just so you know,” Gabriella laughed.
“Hm, really? I guess I should stop taking her to clubs then.”
“And how is little Zoe?”
“Good.”
“Well, she’d better be flippin’ great if she’s stealing you away from me tonight.”
“I’m pretty sure daughter trumps customer,” Riley laughed, slapping the bill down on the counter and sliding it over to Gabriella with one finger.
“Is this a hard and fast rule?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s an always rule.”
“Ah, Riley,” Gabriella said, drawing the back of her hand to her forehead in dramatic fashion. “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.”
“You’re never gone,” Riley snorted. “I wake up; you’re here. I close up; you’re here.”
The two exchanged a friendly laugh, and Gabriella buttoned up her shiny white blazer as she stood. She set some money on the counter and offered Riley an enigmatic smile.
“You’ll be seeing me!” she said as she made her way toward the door.
“Wait, your change!”
Gabriella waved her off. “Keep it!”
Riley looked down and felt her pulse speed up as she saw a crisp hundred-dollar bill on the metal countertop. She blinked in surprise and couldn’t help the enormous smile that pulled at the corners of her lips.
She wasn’t sure what the girl did for a living, but by the way she dressed and the ridiculous tip she’d just left, it was clear money wasn’t an issue for her.
It only took a half hour more to close up the store. Riley had been working there so long, she had everything down to an absolute science.
She did a quick check through the restaurant to make sure nobody was left in the chilly diner. Then made her way into the storage room.
The storeroom was basically an office for the Wrights: the married owners. It was a small room with a desk and rolling chair, printer, and a pile of boxes.
It was also where Patricia Wright told her Zoe could stay after daycare closed until she went home.
But Riley didn’t have a home anymore.
She’d kept the house her ex-husband Joshua and her shared. She stubbornly thought she could make enough to afford the two-bedroom bungalow by the beach.
To say she had fallen hard for the house on the water was an understatement. It was gorgeous; small, but you could hear the waves from the bedroom.
She lived in a lesser-known beach town. The population was small enough to have a neighborly feel, but large enough when the tourists came that the restaurant would get insanely busy.
But, as it turned out, she couldn’t afford the house after Joshua left.
She’d managed to buy a year’s worth of storage at a local rental shop, to the exhaustion of her credit card, and only managed to get about a quarter of her belongings inside. Essentials, like clothes, family keepsakes, and blankets all stayed in her Jeep.
The trouble was, she was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it, so she’d been living in the storeroom at the restaurant for the last two months.
Riley stepped into the room and looked down into the small playpen she’d set up and watched as her daughter Zoe’s chest rose and fell, deep in slumber.
She gathered her down-filled blanket she’d snatched from her car and marched back into the store-room, laying on the ground next to Zoe’s pen and pulling the blankets over her b
ody.
Riley tried to turn off her brain long enough to fall asleep, but thoughts of loneliness and Zoe and money kept running through her head.
The relief of sleep must have kicked in because the next thing she knew the owner of the store was storming through the store-room in a huff.
“No! No, no, no!” Patricia Wright fumed. “Riley, wake up!”
My alarm didn’t go off, she cursed inwardly.
Riley jolted awake and sat up, humiliated that her boss had finally caught her.
“I said you could let Zoe stay here. I didn’t say you could live here!” Patricia said, irritated, spinning in a perpetual circle as she spun on her heel in a panic.
“I know,” Riley said, trying to stay calm. “I know, I’m sorry,” she repeated, bolting to Zoe’s playpen and scooping her up into her arms. “I can explain, Patty.”
Patricia put her hand up, “You can’t stay here.”
“I know,” Riley said again, nodding and making a dire expression she hoped would reveal to Patricia how serious she was taking her words. “I will get everything out of here today. I’m sorry. We’ve been… well,” she sighed, rocking Zoe. “I’m sorry, I just needed a place to go for a few nights.”
“No, Riley,” Patricia said with a sigh, “I mean, you can’t stay here. You’re fired.”
“For…” Riley mumbled, nearly speechless. She could hear commotion from the diner, and she turned her head. “Patricia, please. I’m sorry, I will never stay here again. Please don’t fire me, please.”
“It’s not that,” Patricia said with a deep breath. She looked half irritated and half sorry for Riley, which only made her feel worse. “I mean, that is a problem. I never allowed that. But, Riley,” she said slowly, and the commotion from the diner got even louder. “You didn’t lock the door last night.”
“I didn’t?”
“We were robbed. They took everything in the cash register and everything in the money bag under the counter.”
Riley was stunned. She felt her whole body go cold and shoot hard goosebumps down her arms and back.
She wasn’t sure which horrified her more: that she’d let Mugs get robbed, or that a stranger was inside the building in which she and her daughter were sleeping.
“You gotta go,” Patricia said, gesturing with her thumb toward the door. “I want you to go give a statement to the police and then pack your things up and go.”
Riley’s eyes were wide. She felt like she was going to faint.
“Uh-okay,” she managed to mumble.
She walked toward the door that led down the hall toward the diner and then turned back to Patricia.
“Patty,” she said, emotion crawling up her throat and seizing it shut. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me too,” was Patricia’s only reply.
The police were no kinder to Riley than Patricia had been. They were more suspicious of her story than she'd expected, repeatedly asking her if she knew the people who had robbed the store and whether she'd left the door unlocked on purpose for them.
This was the only time where Patricia spoke up.
"Why would she do that and then sleep through the night with her daughter?" Patricia scoffed, pointing down at the security footage on her phone. "She wouldn't put her girl in danger like that."
"It wouldn't be dangerous if she knew the men who came into the diner, ma'am," one of the officers, a blond-haired man, said as he glanced toward the footage.
"Nah, ridiculous. Wasn't her, no way no how," Patricia said, waving him off.
It was only at her behest that they dropped their line of questioning toward Riley, though they did explain to her she may be called in for questioning at a later date.
Once they were done speaking with her, Riley wandered into the storeroom and began packing up her things: disassembling Zoe's playpen and slowly taking her belongings out into her car.
As she was leaving, she burst into tears and tried to convince Patricia—no, begged her—to let her stay. She needed this job more than ever. Besides Zoe and her car, it was literally the only thing she had left.
But Patricia took no pity on her, and she couldn't say she blamed her boss.
Riley drove to the beach and sat on the sand for the rest of the day, listening to the waves wash in and watching as Zoe built wet sandcastles and decorated them with twigs.
They would sleep in her car tonight, she thought, making a mental list in her head on how to proceed from here.
She would look for jobs on her phone.
Then tomorrow, she would call her best friend, Leah, and ask to crash for the evening.
Somehow, Riley thought, she was going to make this all work out.
Chapter Two
Logan
When Logan was twenty, the mirror was his friend. It showed off his tan skin and dark hair. It ensured he was dressed and prepped for aristocratic functions or work. At nearly thirty, the mirror was not something Logan went out of his way to look at.
These days he looked sleep deprived, with premature wrinkles. He felt like he hadn't gotten a proper rest in one whole year.
At age eighteen, Logan was prepped to take over his father's business in the event that anything happened to Mr. Williams Senior. Yet, with all his training, he hadn't so much as spend an entire weekend at the offices of his father's construction business.
The company built affordable vacation condos in tropical locations, inspired by their own home at Crystal Beach: the private island reserved for billionaires only.
Last year was the first time Logan had put in an actual day of work in the offices.
Even now, he didn’t spend much time in the offices. He would rather sell the company than learn to run it properly, but his younger sister, who was 50% owner, threw a fit when he had suggested selling his shares.
Logan stared into the reflection of his office bathroom and let out a loud sigh. Today marked the one-year anniversary of his father's death. ALS took his mind first, and then his body last year.
As if watching his father deal with a neurological disorder wasn’t bad enough, he had to learn in record-time how to operate his father’s business.
Amidst this trauma, he asked his long-time girlfriend to marry him. To bring some good into his life. They broke up not long after the proposal.
He splashed some water on his face and shook his head.
He was done with the office.
"I quit my job today," Logan said as he sat down at a local island restaurant. He was supposed to meet one of his closest friends, Timothy Down, for lunch.
"You..." Timothy barely repeated, scratching his head.
Timothy stared down at the menu and then quickly gave his attention to the waitress. "Uh, a pint of the local brew and the lomi-lomi salmon."
"Steak with the pineapple slaw. Medium," Logan said dismissively, handing the menu back to the waitress. "And gin."
"And tonic?" the blonde waitress asked, and Logan shook his head.
"Just gin," he said, and the waitress nodded and made her way back to the kitchen to put in the order.
Timothy turned back to Logan and drew his brows together before offering a scolding, amused laugh. "Can you do that when it's technically your company?"
"Let my sister have it," he said with a wave of his hand. “I’m sick of it.”
“What did they do?” Timothy continued to laugh even as he received his beer from the waitress. “How do employees react when the mastermind of their company just ups and quits?”
Logan shrugged. In truth, those present didn’t seem the least bit surprised. They had all regarded him as a rich trust-fund kid who was too spoiled to work and too incompetent to run a company.
And he had just proved them right.
“They were shocked,” he said and took a sip of the warm gin. “But it’s my sister’s problem now.”
“Poor Gabriella,” Timothy said, looking across the table at his friend. “Does your mom know?”
“I came right from the
office to here. You’re the first one I told.”
Timothy slapped a hand across his chest and joked, “I feel honored.”
“I feel good. You know? I feel like a weight has been lifted.”
“Uh-huh,” Timothy nodded and then asked, “So uh, what are you going to do for money now?”
Timothy was the only person Logan had shared his trust-fund woes with. While there was still a substantial amount left, it wouldn’t be enough to continue living the way that he was.
“I’m uh… I’m going to claim my inheritance,” he said, paused, and then clarified, “From my father’s will.”
His friend cocked a curious brow and leaned back in his chair. “Doesn’t that require, like, a wife?”
It was true.
According to his father’s will, Logan stood to inherit one-point-three billion, but only when he got married.
“This is a practical joke,” Logan had said upon reading it, slapping the page in his hand and looking over at his sister.
Gabriella wiped her eyes, still freshly stained with tears, and took the page from him. They had agreed to read their father’s will together to see how much they stood to inherit.
She did not have the same stipulation on her inheritance, though she would have to wait until she was thirty to get her cut. Unlike himself, Gabriella didn’t complain about these rules.
“He didn’t want to give me anything,” he said with a choke in his throat. He and his father never got along well.
“Or maybe he just thought…” she began and then drew a blank.
“Yeah,” he scoffed. “That it would never happen.”
“No, he probably thought you and—”