The Billionaire’s Fake Bride: (Crystal Beach Resort Standalone Series: Book 2)

by Hart, Hanna

  Brielle looked taken aback, but she couldn’t deny it. She’d spread rumors of infidelity with his parents, told media outlets that they were having financial problems with the resorts, and even sold a story to an online gossip site that Levi was being arrested for selling drugs and that the family was trying to cover it up.

  All lies.

  “I was upset!” she said brashly.

  “You ripped my heart out, Bree! I begged and begged and begged you to stay with me. You tore my whole life apart! Now you want to call a truce?”

  “I want to be here with you,” she said firmly. “I never even left Crystal!” she cried. “That’s how much I regretted everything! Please, Coop. I’m going crazy without you.”

  "Brielle…” he said slowly, considering his options.

  It would be so easy to go back to her. To pretend like nothing was ever broken between them. But she couldn’t be trusted.

  She had lied to much—to him when she’d first come back to Crystal Breach.

  To the marriage counselor when she said he never listened to her—didn’t give her the time of day. That he didn’t love her.

  To arbitration, when arguing over why she deserved more alimony than was in the prenup.

  To the media when the divorce was finalized.

  Lies, lies, lies.

  “I can’t,” he said slowly and immediately regretted it.

  “You can’t?” she repeated forcefully. “Cooper. This is us. Six years? You want to throw that away?”

  “You already threw it away!” he shouted and realized he was receiving attention from his employees, several of them snapping to attention and blatantly looking in through the windowed walls.

  A terrible design choice, he now realized.

  He could hear a sharp noise coming from the hall and watched as Grace Stevens began clapping her hands together.

  “Everybody in the break room!” she cheered. “We’ve got new K-cups—the real wacky flavors. Come on, pick your poison!”

  It was a distraction, of course. A way to shuffle everyone away from his private business. It was a cheap ploy, but he was thankful for it.

  Chapter Five

  Grace

  Grace had busied herself in her work for the last four days. She inhaled sharply and felt a familiar buzz of strange homesickness when she considered that it had only been five days since her wedding debacle.

  It was the same that feeling you get that wakes you from a deep sleep into a cold sweat. That feeling you get when something is unmistakably wrong.

  Today was the first day she would be spending down by the beach, overseeing a wedding.

  She felt sick at the thought.

  During her own wedding planning, she had been shadowing Turkish Ainsley—a thirty-five-year-old wedding planner and PR whiz that was neither married nor Turkish.

  The plan was to spend her mornings making bullet point lists of the daily appointments for Mr. Grant so he knew how to prepare for the day ahead, and spend the rest of the day working on wedding plans.

  "Where's Mr. Grant?” Grace asked as she approached Mirna’s desk at the front entrance of the office. “Have you seen him today?”

  “Still out 'sick,'” Mirna said with wide eyes that were sinister with gossip.

  “Seriously?" Grace huffed, flopping the folder of daily tasks down on the counter in front of her. “Never mind that the rest of us have work to do.”

  “Things with his ex-wife didn't go well,” Mirna said, leaning forward. “I heard she wanted to get back together with him and he said no. Then there was a big fight, and now she’s threatening to take the island from him. That’s the rumor, anyway.”

  “I think you missed your calling in investigative journalism,” Grace winked, and Mirna looked beyond proud to receive such a comment. “Seriously, though, can she do that?”

  Mirna shrugged. “Oh, who knows. But it certainly makes for an interesting day at the office.”

  “Think we’d lose our jobs?” Grace asked. “If she took over, I mean?”

  “I doubt it,” Mirna said, ignoring the phone that was ringing a mile a minute on her desk. “She’s in retail, as far as I know. Clothing retail,” she clarified as though it were a sin. “So, I don’t know how she’d manage to take over the company. It’s more likely she would bankrupt the Grant’s than keep the resort running.”

  “That’s comforting,” Grace scoffed. “Well… Brielle Grant says a lot of things,” she rolled her eyes. “Why should we start believing her now?”

  “Did you hear what happened to her shop after they broke up?”

  Grace shrugged. She’d never been into Brielle’s shop, though she had walked passed it a number of times when she visited the piers on the mainland, away from the private island.

  “I heard that somebody wrote a bunch of profanity across this door. And the door is really special,” Mirna said, lowering her voice slightly as different employees began coming back from their lunch breaks. “And the door was this driftwood piece that had come off the Celtic Rose.”

  “Uh-huh,” Grace said absent-mindedly as she began flicking through the folder she had dropped on Mirna’s desk.

  “You know the Celtic Rose, right?” Mirna asked, and when Grace shook her head, Mirna gasped in shock and immediately opened a browser search page on the computer in front of her.

  Tilting the screen toward Grace, Mirna pointed a chubby finger at the various black and white photos of an old prairie schooner with intricate rose carvings strewn along the sides.

  “That’s the Celtic Rose?” Grace asked, and Mirna nodded.

  “You’re a bad islander,” Mirna teased.

  “I know, I know.”

  “Well, anyway,” the gossipy secretary continued but was interrupted by another phone call.

  Grace was just about to excuse herself when Mirna raised a patient finger to her and picked up the phone, “Crystal Beach Romance Resorts Tourism Center, where may I direct your call? Mm-hmm. Oh, I see. Yes, that is frustrating, I’m so sorry. I’ll direct you to sales immediately. No, thank you. Anyway!” Mirna said, looking up at Grace. “Where was I?”

  “Um… something about a door?”

  “Right! Brielle’s door!”

  Grace inwardly cringed at her co-worker’s overly familiar references. She herself had been working for Cooper Grant for four years and had never called him anything but ‘Mr. Grant’—and she worked with him directly.

  “The door came from the Celtic Rose, which was one of the first ships on record to ever win the Nani Makai Crystal Beach Regatta!”

  “So,” Grace said, drawing out the vowel. She leaned her elbows on the front of Mirna’s tall desk and eventually finished, “How’d it become driftwood?”

  “Well, the story goes that the ship competed five years later in another regatta and got swept away by a terrible storm. Left five people dead.”

  “Wow,” Grace mused. “And so… how’d they know this door piece was from the boat?”

  Mirna shrugged and Grace nearly rolled her eyes. Ask about romantic gossip, and Mirna had all the answers. Ask her about factual sources for backing up her stories, and she was zipper-lipped.

  “But anyway,” Grace hurried the story along. “So this historical boat piece was made into a door for a boutique clothing store on the mainland, and then people wrote curse words on it?”

  “Terrible curse words,” Mirna corrected. “Just some nasty, awful things about Brielle. She thought it was Cooper and lost her mind. I heard they said she was running drugs in her store.”

  “They, who?” Grace frowned. “That was written on the door?”

  “No, no,” Mirna waved her off in frustration. “Aren’t you listening?”

  Grace began to laugh in frustration and announced, “I’m trying to! But, you know what? I have a lot to get to today so, thanks for the history lesson Mirna. I’ve got to get to it.”

  “Oh, right,” Mirna said gravely. “You’re handling the Thomas-Wheeler wedding?”<
br />
  “That’s right,” Grace said.

  “Well, good luck,” Mirna said.

  Grace let out a final sigh and shook her head.

  “I just know it’ll probably be hard for you, considering…” Mirna trailed off, trying desperately to get Grace to make eye-contact with her.

  What did the woman want to happen right now, Grace wondered? Did she expect Grace to burst into tears and tell her all of her problems so that the next cubicle worker could hear the goodies and gossip from Mirna at lunch?

  No thank you.

  “Considering I was dumped at that very location five days ago?” Grace said whimsically. “No. I’ve got this. I’ll be just fine, but thanks for asking.”

  “At least that’s one thing you can thank the Grants for!” Mirna called down the hall as Grace began to walk away.

  Spinning on her heel to face the native woman once again, Grace asked, “What’s that?”

  “The gossip!” Mirna laughed as though the answer should have been obvious. “I bet it takes a lot of the stress off of you to have all these other rumors going around! Looks like you already had your five minutes of fame!”

  Without a smile, Grace turned back around and made her way to her desk. She nearly threw Mr. Grant’s folder on her keyboard and sat gruffly down in her chair.

  In part, what Mirna said was right.

  Brielle storming into the office the other day and making such an embarrassing scene had practically erased Grace’s failed wedding from everyone’s radar.

  So, perhaps, she should be grateful.

  But then again, it seemed such a strange thing that something that had sent Grace’s whole life into a tailspin should be forgotten after just a few days.

  Chapter Six

  Cooper

  The conversation with Brielle didn’t go well.

  It continued not to go well for five days afterward. They’d tried to meet for lunch, much to the chagrin of his family. They argued during lunch, argued over text morning to night, argued when he’d seen her on the city pier with another her man on the mainland.

  Her cousin, he had realized when she had showed him pictures in her defense, but just seeing her with someone else made him sick to his stomach.

  She’d come to his apartment and tried to seduce him—to make him bend to her whims, but he’d sent her away which only led to even more fighting.

  He had never felt broken like this before. Never felt as hurt as he did when she left his life or as riddled with anxiety when she had popped back into his daily life.

  Cooper just couldn’t submit himself back to a life of the uncertainty that Brielle brought with her.

  “I said no,” he had finally said when she’d come to his apartment.

  Of course, she’d managed to pull him in for warm, familiar, seductive kisses before he got a hold of himself.

  He slammed the door in her face and stood by the peep-hole, watching with a sick stomach to see what she might do. If she cried, he decided on a whim, then he would bring her into his home and wrap her up in his arms. If she cried then and there, he would have to try again with her then.

  But she didn’t.

  Instead, she calmly knocked on his door, and he opened it.

  When he stepped aside, she dug through her oversized leather backpack and pulled out a long white paper.

  “Here,” she said with acid dripping off her tone.

  He frowned, looking down at the paper. “What’s this?”

  “I’m talking you for half of the island,” she said with words so cold he felt all the color leave his body.

  “What?” he said, breathless. “You can’t do that. We’re divorced, Bree. We had a prenup. The time for that is over. It’s already been decided.”

  “No,” she said evenly. "It's called a belated claim," she snapped, "and the judge just signed off on approval for me to file because my new lawyer," she enunciated, "just found this."

  Brielle whipped the paper upside down against the wall. She spun the document so it faced him and he skimmed the lines. She was entitled to exactly one million dollars, and an extra million for every child they had together—which turned out to be zero.

  "What's your point, Bree?" he asked, looking over the page as quickly as he could, trying to zero in on particular keywords like "POST-DIVORCE" or "ENTITLED TO."

  Brielle tapped her inverted French-tipped nails down on the paper and ran it along a busy paragraph. And then he saw it.

  Property Division

  Upon taking the Grant surname, Brielle Montgomery will become an inducted member of the Grant family and will thereby be entitled to a half of Cooper Grant's island property and earnings unless he is remarried within three months of Mr. Grant and Miss. Montgomery’s divorce.

  Cooper stared down at the paper and though there must be some sort of mistake. But no, there couldn’t be. His parents most trusted lawyers had gone through this prenup with a fine toothcomb.

  In fact, his parents were the ones who had made all the stipulations to begin with.

  “You’re trying to take the island?” he asked, incensed.

  “Maybe when it’s mine, you’ll realize living here isn’t the big dream you thought it was. Maybe you won’t be so attached to Crystal.”

  “You’re the one who didn’t want to stay, Bree! Now you’re taking the island? We went through arbitration to avoid all this!”

  The argument grew more heated from there. He’d gone from being heartbroken to furious in mere minutes.

  Rumor had already begun spreading around the billionaire neighborhoods of island condos that Cooper was in some sort of strange custody battle of the island.

  He’d had his lawyer look the paper over, and it was iron-clad.

  Then he’d spent a whole twenty-four hours in his house with a bottle of gin before emerging for lunch the following day with his parents to ask how in the world they could have let this happen—and if there was anything they could do about it now.

  “Sip your water, dear,” his mother, Tilly, had insisted. She grabbed the slice of lemon off the side of his glass and squeezed it into the sparkling liquid before pushing it toward him.

  “She can’t do this,” Cooper said, staring at the yellowy pulp that was now floating in his glass.

  “Oh, but she can,” his father, Herbert, said with a solemn nod.

  Neither he nor his mother were particularly interested in their lunch, but his father and Levi didn’t seem one bit disturbed by the news. Both ordered five-second seared steaks laid out with a bed of greens on top and a side of clam chowder. Both dug in as soon as the meals were brought to the table.

  Cooper had ordered lobster mac and cheese. It was a meal that he had liked since he was a child. Usually, it made him happy, but today, even with a hangover, he couldn’t seem to stomach it.

  “Why was the prenup laid out like that?” Cooper asked, not making eye contact with either of his parents.

  His father straightened in his chair as he sawed into his mostly pink steak. “This island has been in my family for generations,” Herbert began gruffly.

  “You tell ‘em, pa,” Levi jested, looking up at Cooper mischievously.

  “Yes, I understand that,” Cooper said and then sunk down into his chair, throwing his napkin over his plate. “But why Brielle…”

  “Oh, Cooper,” his mother cooed. She set a hand against her permed blonde bob and shook her head, clearly distressed for him.

  “Oh, Cooper?” Levi repeated with a laugh. “You were going nuts over this chick five days ago, and now you’re all ‘why Brielle’? Give me a break.”

  “Boys,” their mother snipped. She did so quietly, as not to draw attention from the restaurant staff, but both knew the tone well enough not to argue.

  “Levi,” Tilly continued. “Please, don’t refer to women as chicks. You know I despise such surfer talk.”

  Levi widened his eyes to Cooper, and they exchanged a smile at the reprimand—out of their mother’s view, of c
ourse.

  “This arrangement is how it has always been,” Cooper’s father said somewhat defensively. “Whoever a Grant marries becomes legally entitled to the island. It’s in the Grant name!”

  “The mighty name!” Levi jested, banging a fist against the table.

  Herbert looked at Levi and needled his brows together, but wasn’t without humor as he aimed a finger at the younger sibling and teased, “You’d better watch it. Learn something from this.”

  Levi raised both brows and took another bite of steak. “I refuse to learn anything from this because I refuse to get married,” he said between bites.

  “Levi!” Their mother scolded with a gasp. “Don’t. Not today.”

  “I refuse!” Levi continued with a laugh. “Nobody is worth what Cooper just went through.” Cooper’s brother paused briefly and then corrected, “Is still going through.”

  “Well, we don’t all marry women like Brielle,” his father said thoughtfully. “What about your mother?”

  Cooper sighed inwardly. Here it came. The endless diatribe about how his mother had saved his father from wreck and ruin. How she was the perfect wife who never caused him any pain.

  It wasn’t that Cooper didn’t appreciate his parent’s strong marriage over the years. It was the rose-colored tint that stories were told with that Cooper was sick of hearing. He could well remember all the nights they had spent arguing when they were trying to keep the resort from going under.

  His parents had been married for thirty-one years. His mother only eighteen when they were married. She loved to say that after their vows she ‘never looked back.’

  Three years later they would have Cooper. Two years later Levi, and their complete family was born.

  “You want me to marry someone like mom?” Levi snorted. “Do we have to get into how weird this conversation is getting?”

  “Marrying your mother was the best thing that ever happened to me!” his father defended. “Do you know where I would be if she weren't in my life?”