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Falling For Her Fake Fiancé
Sarah M. Anderson
All it takes to seal the deal is one little temporary engagement….Ethan Logan never fails. But taking over the multi-million-dollar Beaumont Brewery is proving impossible. To succeed will mean taking drastic measures. It means proposing to a red-haired Beaumont bombshell. It’s the perfect plan—until Ethan realizes he wants her for more than just business….Frances Beaumont won’t marry a total stranger and get nothing in return. But once Ethan agrees to the socialite’s terms, she expects their charade to go off without a hitch. Frances doesn’t believe in love and has never met a man she couldn’t handle. And then one kiss from her fake fiancé changes everything….
All of the raw power he projected was clearly—and safely—locked down.
He turned her hand over and kissed the back of it. In the enclosed space of the office, with no one to witness his chivalrous gesture, she couldn’t tell if the kiss was a threat or a seduction. Or both.
Then he raised his gaze and looked her in the eyes. Suddenly, the room was much warmer, the air much thinner. Frances had to use every ounce of her self-control not to start taking huge, gulping breaths just to get some oxygen into her body. Oh, but he had nice eyes, warm and determined and completely focused on her.
She might have underestimated him. “I’m not going to take the job.”
He laughed then. It was a warm sound, full of humor and honesty. It made her want to smile.
“I wasn’t going to offer it to you again. You’re right—it is beneath you.”
Here it came—the trap he was waiting to spring. He leaned forward, his gaze intent on hers.
“I don’t want to hire you. I want to marry you.”
* * *
Falling for Her Fake Fiancé is part of the Beaumont Heirs series: One Colorado family, limitless scandal!
Falling for her Fake Fiancé
Sarah M. Anderson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Award-winning author SARAH M. ANDERSON may live east of the Mississippi River, but her heart lies out West on the Great Plains. With a lifelong love of horses and two history teachers for parents, she had plenty of encouragement to learn everything she could about the tribes of the Great Plains.
When she started writing, it wasn’t long before her characters found themselves out in South Dakota among the Lakota Sioux. She loves to put people from two different worlds into new situations and to see how their backgrounds and cultures take them someplace they never thought they’d go.
Sarah’s book A Man of Privilege won the 2012 RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best. Her book Straddling the Line was named Best of 2013 by CataRomance, and Mystic Cowboy was a 2014 Booksellers’ Best Award finalist in the Single Title category as well as a finalist for the Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence.
When not helping out at her son’s school or walking her rescue dogs, Sarah spends her days having conversations with imaginary cowboys and American Indians, all of which is surprisingly well tolerated by her wonderful husband. Readers can find out more about Sarah’s love of cowboys and Indians at www.sarahmanderson.com (http://www.sarahmanderson.com).
To Jennifer Porter, who took me under her wing before I was published and helped give me a platform to talk about heroes in cowboy hats. Thank you so much for supporting me! We’ll always have dessert at Junior’s together!
Contents
Cover (#uc37479a4-da0d-528f-bd6d-2538f7f7c736)
Introduction (#ub4e55dd0-70a6-5840-95bf-2a7182694779)
Title Page (#ud16c1e5e-da3d-52ad-b699-de313013b035)
About the Author (#uafe354b1-a3c4-5786-b131-af732d5b8589)
Dedication (#u083b7ef1-6673-5cec-85b3-babf8d997ebe)
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#u5aa978d0-710e-530f-ba53-5c496bf1f888)
“Mis-ter Logan,” the old-fashioned intercom rasped on Ethan’s desk.
He scowled at the thing and at the way his current secretary insisted on hissing his name. “Yes, Delores?” He’d never been in an office that required an intercom. It felt as if he’d walked into the 1970s.
Of course, that was probably how old the intercom was. After all, Ethan was sitting in the headquarters of the Beaumont Brewery. This room—complete with hand-carved everything—probably hadn’t been redecorated since, well...
A very long time ago. The Beaumont Brewery was 160 years old, after all.
“Mis-ter Logan,” Delores rasped again, her dislike for him palatable. “We’re going to have to stop production on the Mountain Cold and Mountain Cold Light lines.”
“What? Why?” Logan demanded. The last thing he could afford was another shutdown.
Ethan had been running this company for almost three months now. His firm, Corporate Restructuring Services, had beat out some heavy hitters for the right to handle the reorganization of the Beaumont Brewery, and Ethan had to make this count. If he—and, by extension, CRS—could turn this aging, antique company into a modern-day business, their reputation in the business world would be cemented.
Ethan had expected some resistance. It was only natural. He’d restructured thirteen companies before taking the helm of Beaumont Brewery. Each company had emerged from the reorganization process leaner, meaner and more competitive in a global economy. Everyone won when that happened.
Yes, thirteen success stories.
Yet nothing had prepared him for the Beaumont Brewery.
“There’s a flu going around,” Delores said. “Sixty-five workers are home sick, the poor dears.”
A flu. Wasn’t that just a laugh and a half? Last week, it’d been a cold that had knocked out forty-seven employees. And the week before, after a mass food poisoning, fifty-four people hadn’t been able to make it in.
Ethan was no idiot. He’d cut the employees a little slack the first two times, trying to earn their trust. But now it was time to lay down the law.
“Fire every single person who called in sick today.”
There was a satisfying pause on the other end of the intercom, and, for a moment, Ethan felt a surge of victory.
The victorious surge was short-lived, however.
“Mis-ter Logan,” Delores began. “Regretfully, it seems that the HR personnel in charge of processing terminations are out sick today.”
“Of course they are,” he snapped. He fought the urge to throw the intercom across the room, but that was an impulsive, juvenile thing to do, and Ethan was not impulsive or juvenile. Not anymore.
So, as unsatisfying as it was, he merely shut off the intercom and glared at his office door.
He needed a better plan.
He always had a plan when he went into a business. His method was proven. He could turn a flailing business around in as little as six months.
But this? The Beaumont freaking Brewery?
That was the problem, he decided. Everyone—the press, the public, their customers and especially the employees—still thought of this as the Beaumont Brewery. Sure, the business had been under Beaumont management for a good century and a half. That was the reason AllBev, the conglomerate that had hired CRS to handle this reorganization, had chosen to keep the Beaumont name a part of the Brewery—the name-recognition value was through the roof.
But it wasn’t the Beaumont family’s brewery anymore. They had been forced out months ago. And the sooner the employees realized that, the better.
He looked around the office. It was beautiful, heavy with history and power.
He’d heard that the conference table had been custom-made. It was so big and heavy that it’d been built in the actual office—they might have to take a wall out to remove it. Tucked in the far corner by a large coffee table was a grouping of two leather club chairs and a matching leather love seat. The coffee table was supposedly made of one of the original wagon wheels that Phillipe Beaumont had used when he’d crossed the Great Plains with a team of Percheron draft horses back in the 1880s.
The only signs of the current decade were the flat-screen television that hung over the sitting area and the electronics on the desk, which had been made to match the conference table.
The entire room screamed Beaumont so loudly he was practically deafened by it.
He flipped on the hated intercom again. “Delores.”
“Yes, Mis—”
He cut her off before she could mangle his name again. “I want to redo the office. I want all this stuff gone. The curtains, the woodwork—and the conference table. All of it.” Some of these pieces—hand carved and well cared for, like the bar—would probably fetch a pretty penny. “Sell it off.”
There was another satisfying pause.
“Yes, sir.” For a moment, he thought she sounded subdued—cowed. As if she couldn’t believe he would really dismantle the heart of the Beaumont Brewery. But then she added, “I know just the appraiser to call,” in a tone that sounded...smug?
He ignored her and went back to his computer. Two lines shut down was not acceptable. If either line didn’t pull double shifts tomorrow, he wouldn’t wait for HR to terminate employees. He’d do it himself.
After all, he was the boss here. What he said went.
And that included the furniture.
* * *
Frances Beaumont slammed her bedroom door behind her and flopped down on her bed. Another rejection—she couldn’t fall much lower.
She was tired of this. She’d been forced to move back into the Beaumont mansion after her last project had failed so spectacularly that she’d had to give up her luxury condo in downtown Denver. She’d even been forced to sell most of her designer wardrobe.
The idea—digital art ownership and crowdsourcing art patronage online by having buyers buy stock in digital art—had been fundamentally sound. Art might be timeless, but art production and collection had to evolve. She’d sunk a considerable portion of her fortune into Art Digitale, as well as every single penny she’d gotten from the sale of the Beaumont Brewery.
What an epic, crushing mistake. After months of delays and false starts—and huge bills—Art Digitale had been live for three weeks before the funds ran out. Not a single transaction had taken place on the website. In her gilded life, she’d never experienced such complete failure. How could she? She was a Beaumont.
Her business failure was bad enough. But worse? She couldn’t get a job. It was as if being a Beaumont suddenly counted for nothing. Her first employer, the owner of Galerie Solaria, hadn’t exactly jumped at the chance to have Frances come back, even though Frances knew how to flatter the wealthy, art-focused patrons and massage the delicate egos of artists. She knew how to sell art—didn’t that count for something?
Plus, she was a Beaumont. A few years ago, people would have jumped at the chance to be associated with one of the founding families of Denver. Frances had been an in-demand woman.
“Where did I go wrong?” she asked her ceiling.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t have an answer.
She’d just turned thirty. She was broke and had moved back in with her family—her brother Chadwick and his family, plus assorted Beaumonts from her father’s other marriages.
She shuddered in horror.
When the family still owned the Brewery, the Beaumont name had meant something. Frances had meant something. But ever since that part of her life had been sold, she’d been...adrift.
If only there was some way to go back, to put the Brewery under the family’s control again.
Yes, she thought bitterly, that was definitely an option. Her older brothers Chadwick and Matthew had walked away and started their own brewery, Percheron Drafts. Phillip, her favorite older brother, the one who had gotten her into parties and helped her build her reputation as the Cool Girl of Denver high society, had ensconced himself out on the Beaumont Farm and gotten sober. No more parties with him. And her twin brother, Byron, was starting a new restaurant.
Everyone else was moving forward, pairing off. And Frances was stuck back in her childhood room, alone.
Not that she believed a man would solve any of her problems. She’d grown up watching her father burn through marriage after unhappy marriage. No, she knew love didn’t exist. Or if it did, it wasn’t in the cards for her.
She was on her own here.
She opened up a message from her friend Becky and stared at the picture of a shuttered storefront. She and Becky had worked together at Galerie Solaria. Becky had no famous last name and no social connections, but she knew art and had a snarky sense of humor that cut through the bull. More to the point, Becky treated Frances like she was a real person, not just a special Beaumont snowflake. They had been friends ever since.
Becky had a proposition. She wanted to open a new gallery, one that would merge the new-media art forms with the standard classics that wealthy patrons preferred. It wasn’t as avant-garde as Frances’s digital art business had been, but it was a good bridge between the two worlds.
