The Billionaire’s Pretend Wife: Preston Billionaires Book One

by North, Leslie

  “And a disaster did happen,” she finished finally. “Tonight. We kept getting our stories wrong, and I—” She drained the rest of her wine in one gulp. “I don’t know, Tessa. I think it’s really about the money with him. I think I’ve been an idiot, and none of the other stuff was real.”

  “Does it feel real for you?” Tessa considered her from the other side of the sofa. “Because if you ask me, that’s where you should start.”

  “When we’re alone, it feels real.” Penny stared down at the fabric of her custom-made gown, remembering how Drew’s eyes had shone in the boutique the day they’d gone shopping. The day after they’d had that amazing sex in his office. “But at the gala tonight, when everything was going off the rails, it felt like his main investment was in the lie. In landing the deal. Money turns men’s heads. You…you know about my dad.”

  Early on in their friendship, just after Penny had moved to town, Tessa had taken her out to a bar. One too many drinks, and the story of her father’s company had spilled out.

  “I know.” Tessa put her wine glass on the table and folded her arms around her legs.

  “He wouldn’t listen to me, either.”

  “Drew listens to you. Doesn’t he? You guys talk about Logan and all kinds of other stuff.”

  Penny shook her head. “He does now, but what about later? I honestly can’t do it again. I felt like I was screaming into the void with my dad. And if Drew is really just like him…”

  “He’s not just like him. He still has his company. But Penny, you don’t have to keep up with this, if you don’t want.” Penny dragged her eyes up from her lap to meet her friend’s gaze. “You can always make a different decision.”

  The wine hit her all at once, weighing down her eyelids. “I hear you,” Penny said, and then yawned.

  “You want to stay in my spare room tonight?” Tessa said.

  Penny’s uncertainty felt like a bruise—one that would open into a wound if she went back to Drew’s house. “Yes. I would love that. You’re a good friend.”

  “I try my best.”

  Penny would have to keep trying her best, too.

  * * *

  Bottom line? Penny needed to talk to Drew.

  He’d probably be pissed at her for staying the night at Tessa’s without a word to him, but who cared about that?

  No. She exhaled as much of her anger as she could. She didn’t owe him an explanation. It wasn’t part of her job to be at the house all night. She just had to be home in time to get Logan up and ready to go to Susan’s.

  It might have been her obligation if they’d ever made anything official. But they hadn’t. The only thing that seemed official right now was that she’d made her feelings known, and he had not liked it.

  Anyway.

  That wasn’t the most important item on her agenda. As the clock ticked over to six in the morning, she tiptoed out of Tessa’s apartment in borrowed yoga pants and a T-shirt and summoned a car with an app on her phone. It dropped her off at Drew’s not long after.

  His door was tightly closed at the end of the hall when she crept to her suite. When she stepped back out of the room a half hour later, showered and dressed, it stood open—a sign for his cleaning staff to go in and make the bed.

  A message from Mike popped up on her phone.

  Mike: Mr. Preston is leaving for the office. Confirm availability for drop-off today?

  Penny: Of course. I’ll wait for Logan to wake up, then proceed as usual.

  Mike: Thank you.

  Penny chewed on her options as she waited, and again as Logan hurtled out of his room, taking a flying leap into her arms. And she ruminated on them again as he got dressed. And again as he ate breakfast.

  She did a series of breathing exercises on the way into the office.

  Susan waited in the Preston lobby. “Hey, buddy,” she called across the space, and Logan went running over to her, Penny following close behind. Penny’s heart twisted. What if Drew had said something to her? “Hi, Penny. Was the drive in OK?”

  “Oh, yes. Totally uneventful.”

  Susan’s face held no sign of knowing anything was amiss. “Thanks for bringing him in.”

  Then she was gone, and Penny was out of excuses. It was time for a chat.

  A burst of laughter stopped her short just outside one of the conference rooms on the way to Drew’s office. It was instinctive, stopping in her tracks instead of walking by. The laughter had had a certain…tenor to it that filled her gut with unease.

  “The most important thing today is to keep the debt under wraps. You’ve got that, right? Steven, it’s not a laughing matter.” But the man who was speaking laughed again anyway. “We’ll have to hope he doesn’t go digging around in our finances too deeply. Let’s not give him a reason. He’ll have time once he owns the company.”

  Steven—whoever Steven was—asked a muffled question as Penny stared blindly at her phone screen. She hadn’t even unlocked it. Everything in her entire body was focused on listening.

  Then Steven cleared his throat. “I’ve got it. Just remember, Michael, that you promised me a bonus when we close.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve got to close first.” The two of them laughed, quieter this time. “Now stop bringing up confidential business.” Michael dropped his voice then.

  Penny exhaled and forced herself to keep moving forward. Her hands shook. She ducked into the women’s restroom a few doors down.

  Okay. She played back the conversation in her mind. It hadn’t been a part of her imagination—she was sure of that. Penny unlocked her phone and jotted down a few of the phrases she could remember. Her heart beat so hard she could feel her pulse in her thumbs.

  Drew had to know about this.

  She took a look at herself in the mirror. The dark circles from the previous night were hardly noticeable. Head up. Chin up. They’d sort everything out in a matter of minutes.

  But when she stepped into Drew’s outer office thirty seconds later, Britta glanced up at her. His secretary’s shoulders sagged. “Oh, shoot, Penny. You just missed him.”

  Her heart sank. “The meeting with Michael?”

  “Yes. Shouldn’t be too long, I don’t think. Do you want me to call you when he’s back?” Britta looked so hopeful. So helpful. But Penny couldn’t fathom leaving Preston Logistics to go sit in a coffee shop and wait. Drinking coffee wasn’t going to help the jitters she had now.

  “I’ll wait here, if that’s okay.”

  It seemed like forever until Drew came back into the office, whistling a merry tune that died on his lips the moment he saw her. His expression softened.

  “Hey.” He inclined his head toward the office in the back. “Come in for a minute.”

  She followed him in and shut the door behind her.

  “I’m not happy about how things went last night.” Drew sat on the front of his desk, blue eyes clouded. “I don’t like how they ended, and I don’t like that we couldn’t figure things out between us.”

  “I don’t like it either,” she admitted. “But there’s a bigger problem right now than our fake relationship.”

  Something like a smirk bent the corner of his mouth. “All right. Message received.”

  Penny took a moment to wrench her mind away from her own irritation. “Listen, I—I think we both said a lot to each other in the heat of the moment last night. And for the record, I still think that some of what we have is really…it’s real.” She struggled for every word. “Honestly, I’m not sure if we should go forward with anything. When we’re mixing reality and lies, it’s hard to know where the line between them falls. But before we talk about that, you have to know something about Michael.”

  “Michael Bower?” He narrowed his eyes. “How do you know Michael?”

  “I don’t know him, but…I know about people like him.”

  “And what is he like?”

  Drew was skeptical, and that was fine. Penny took a deep breath. “I overheard him talking to his colleagu
e on my way in here. They must have been waiting for you in the meeting room, but they were talking about hiding debts from you.” A sick feeling curdled her stomach. “They specifically said they didn’t want to give you a reason to look into their finances—that you’d have time to figure it out when you owned the company.”

  Drew looked down at his feet, and when he looked back up his eyes were filled with a sharp disbelief. “I don’t know where to begin with that.”

  “Maybe begin with their numbers. That would be my suggestion.” Penny’s hands tingled with nervous energy.

  “I’m not going to start interrogating them because you think you overheard them talking about this. You could have misunderstood. You could have misheard.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Look.” He straightened up so that he was standing at his full height. “After last night, I don’t think it’s the best idea if we…keep going in this direction.”

  Her heart stuttered, then stopped, the missing beats a painful absence. “What direction is that?”

  “I don’t think we should be discussing business,” Drew said flatly. “You weren’t honest with me about the issue you were having last night. You still haven’t been honest with me about it. And I think it’s best if we keep the two arenas separate while emotions are running high.”

  “Are you accusing me of lying?” There wasn’t enough air in the room.

  “No. I’m saying that Jack’s gone, Penny. He’s not going to sell the company to us. It’s Michael’s company or nothing. And I’m not willing to leave with nothing. So far, everything looks good, and Michael has a good reputation.”

  She had been right. He was more invested in making a deal than in anything else. It had been a mistake to let herself fall for him, even the slightest.

  History was repeating itself.

  He couldn’t hear her and would rather take a chance on a bad deal than accept the truth.

  Penny couldn’t bear it.

  She nodded once, then twice, then said the only words that came to her mind. “I’m moving out.”

  12

  “It’s twenty minutes each way. Is that going to be feasible for you with Logan’s schedule?”

  Penny straightened up from the suitcase she was packing and ran a hand through her hair. “Yeah, I think it will. Twenty minutes isn’t the longest commute I’ve ever had in my life.”

  Drew vacillated between feeling frozen through and shocked by an awful lightning strike. She’d been angry after the gala. So had he, but mostly at himself.

  But then she’d come into his office and tried to tell him how to run his business. It had raised his hackles. Obviously, he wasn’t going to make a purchase without vetting the company.

  This was how he’d gotten in over his head with Susan, too. She’d had too much access to the company, and she’d run with it. And she’d nearly run it into the ground.

  No, he decided, going back on himself for the third time in thirty seconds. This was my own fault. He had mixed his personal life and business. He had let himself get too close to a woman he should have kept strictly as an employee. He had trusted her, and that was a mistake.

  Not for Logan. She had never given any hint that she was less than stellar as a nanny, which was why he hadn’t fired her. He didn’t want to do that to his son.

  In terms of their relationship—any kind of relationship—it was not good.

  “I can send Mike with the car every morning to pick you up and drop you off,” he said decisively, reaching for any way to take control of the conversation.

  Penny frowned. “I don’t think that’s a great idea. It’s probably best if I have my own vehicle on property.”

  Drew didn’t think any of this was best. It all seemed like a Jenga tower primed to fall. “I get it. A quick escape is a necessity sometimes.”

  “I’ve been in enough collapsing businesses to know when it’s time to go,” she quipped.

  “Have you?” Drew’s mind went still and clear with focus. “I don’t think you mentioned that.”

  She flicked her eyes to him and back to the suitcase, then reached for another shirt from the dresser. “I had to leave my last job and go looking because it fell apart all around me. That’s how my resume ended up in your inbox.” She sighed. “I didn’t want another Fox Worldwide disaster.”

  Penny had mumbled the last bit, but he heard it anyway.

  Fox Worldwide?

  Her cheeks had gone red, but she didn’t say anything else. She just grabbed the last of her clothes from the dresser and tossed them into the suitcase, then zipped it closed. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”

  Yes. I want you to stay and fight with me until we figure this out.

  But his mind pulled him away from the thought like it was a hot stovetop.

  “No.”

  The best he could do was to carry her suitcases down to the front door. Penny took them out of his hands, not meeting his eyes. “Text me if you think of anything else that needs hashing out,” she said, and she left without a backward glance.

  * * *

  “She’s the daughter of Rudy Fox, of Fox Worldwide.” Louis, the head of security at Preston Logistics and a former investigator, was confident. It rang in his voice. Drew had given him two hours to do a background check on Penny. It had taken the man less than forty-five minutes to email a full file. He was good.

  But the news was bad.

  It was probably the worst start to a Monday morning Drew had ever had.

  “The Rudy Fox?” Drew did not want to believe it. But it made total sense. All the puzzle pieces clicked together in his mind.

  Penny’s knowledge about the logistics industry.

  The way she’d had so much corporate experience in Toronto but ended up starting a new career across the continent.

  And the way she had slowly and surely broken down his defenses until he trusted her.

  Until he had feelings for her. Powerful ones.

  “It’s a shame,” Louis said. “Anything else, boss?”

  No. No, there wasn’t anything else.

  This was why Drew made the rules he made. People were unpredictable, and the only way to manage the fallout from their unpredictable behavior was to keep them away from the things that mattered. Away from companies that could be vulnerable if, for example, Drew took a day off. Away from families that could be vulnerable.

  A knock at the door pulled him briefly out of the whirlwind…and right back in again.

  Penny hurried in without waiting for an answer and put a small bag on his desk. “I just wanted to drop these off. It didn’t seem right to just leave them out with a note or something.”

  Numbly, he looked inside the bag.

  It was half filled with black velvet jewelry boxes.

  “I don’t want these,” he managed.

  “They’re yours.” Penny shrugged one shoulder.

  “All right.”

  He dragged his gaze up to hers. When their eyes met, her eyebrows drew together. “Did something happen?”

  “Yeah, something happened.” What was the point of holding any of it back now? “After you mentioned Fox Worldwide, I had one of my people do a background check.”

  Understanding dawned on her face, followed by surprise. “Wait. You hired me as a nanny without doing a background check?”

  “Of course we did a background check back then. It only screened for your criminal record. I didn’t think your parents mattered.”

  Penny lifted her chin, eyes burning with defiance. “They don’t matter in this context, so you were right about that.”

  “Is that true?” She leaned back as if he’d pushed her. “Because now, Penny, I’m wondering if you picked up some habits from your father.”

  “What habits?”

  “Like using a personal relationship to get close to me so you could get insider information on Preston Logistics.”

  Her face went totally blank, and then she laughed, high and hars
h. “Are you serious? You’re serious.”

  “How could I be anything other than serious right now? Fox Worldwide is legendary in the industry for being in bed with conmen. And that’s where you worked, wasn’t it? You had to be involved. You had to have learned a few tricks of the trade.”

  Penny’s face had gone white, except for two red splotches high on her cheeks. “That’s not what happened.”

  “You’re telling me that you gained all kinds of corporate experience at Fox Worldwide but had no idea that your own father—your own father—was in league with a known bad actor?”

  “That’s not what happened,” Penny insisted. “First of all, I resent the fact that you think I learned tricks from my father to…to cheat people. I can’t believe you, after what you’ve done, would assume—” She took a frustrated breath, and Drew’s heart squeezed in irrational sympathy. He couldn’t help himself. He was angry, but the sight of her this thrown still affected him. “My father was not a conman. He was ready to retire, and he always believed the best of people. So when—when that man approached him, he was certain it would all work out. I tried to warn him that it was a bad deal, but he was just too optimistic to hear me. Like you haven’t heard me about your backup acquisition.”

  “Too optimistic,” echoed Drew. “Just like me? What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m trying to tell you what I think of your deal. I’m telling you what I know about Michael’s company. Can’t you see that?”

  “What I can see is that you came to the gala with a chip on your shoulder. You deliberately disagreed with me in front of multiple people.” The full weight of it didn’t hit him until he was saying the words out loud. “I think you sabotaged things with Jack.”

  Drew had never felt so stupid in his entire life. It was worse than when Susan had gone in on his week off and sold off company assets and information, losing two of their biggest clients in the process. It was worse than the day he’d had to lay off two dozen people with only the promise that when he fixed things, they’d have their jobs back.