Page 5 of Heart Breaker

I let out a short, disbelieving breath. “That’s interesting,” I say sharply. “Seeing as I’ve already been pulled into it. Seeing as I’m apparently your wife now.”

Jesse snorts.

“Sorry, that just slipped out,” he says when I shoot him a look.

I take a step closer to Wes. “You listen to me,” I say, pointing a finger toward his chest. “You don’t get to decide this for me. This—” I gesture between us, “—this is my life too, and you are not dragging me into whatever this is.”

He holds my gaze without agreeing or arguing. He just stands there steady and unflinching and that’s when it finally clicks that he’s really not going to fix this.

“Unbelievable,” I mutter, shaking my head. “You are actually unbelievable.”

“Oh,” Jesse says under his breath, sitting forward as his chair legs hit the floor. “This just got interesting.”

I ignore him.

“Fix it,” I snap one last time in Wes’s direction. “Or I will.”

Turning on my heel, I storm out of Cove without waiting for a response. The nerve of him. As if I’d ever go along with a plan like this.

TWO

Wes

“She’s going to eat you alive,” Jesse says, like he’s looking forward to it.

Lottie’s exit was so abrupt I almost missed the way she looked as she stormed out. Almost. Fitted jeans on a body that makes it difficult to concentrate on anything else. A round ass you couldn’t ignore if you tried on a body I’ve spent a fair amount of time wondering what it would feel like to worship. Every single gorgeous inch. It’s been a problem for me and my right hand ever since I first saw her last year at a brewery in town with Jesse and Madeline. I still remember being mesmerized by the way she laughed that night, cheeks flushed, head tipped back.

She wasn’t laughing today, though. In fact, before she turned and marched out of the Cove office, she looked at me like she could kill me. And I can’t really blame her. I’m still not quite sure how I landed us both in this mess.

I turn my attention to Ford, who’s sitting behind his desk with his attention locked on me. Jesse’s in one of the chairs across from him looking much more relaxed. He’s leaning back, his legs stretched out in front of him, like he’s settled in for a show.

“She’s not going to eat me alive,” I say finally.

Jesse huffs out a laugh. “Wes, she stormed into the office like a hurricane and left the same way. In between, she screamed at you. She’s going to destroy you, man.”

I sigh. Jesse isn’t wrong. I swear Lottie was one second away from flipping the boardroom table.

Ford leans back in his chair, watching me closely, his expression hard to read. “She was pretty angry,” he agrees. “I doubt she’s going to go along with this.”

I finally glance up at him. “You don’t know that.”

Jesse raises a brow. “No, but I do. I know Lottie better than either of you. She’s Madeline’s best friend.”

“I’ll talk to her,” I tell them.

That earns me a look, not just from Jesse but from Ford too.

Jesse leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Okay,” he says slowly. “So, explain to me how this is going to go. You sit her down, tell her again that you want the world to think you’re married, and she just… what? Agrees to play along?”

I don’t answer right away because hearing it out loud makes it sound ridiculous, and it probably is.

This whole mess started from nothing. We went out for my brother’s birthday—nothing wild, just dinner here in Deep Cove. A photographer from some gossip site caught us leaving, my hand on Lottie’s back, her head tilted toward me, her ring catching just enough light to turn something completely innocent into something else entirely. By morning, the rumors were everywhere. Lottie and I were in a secret relationship—not just that, we were secretly married. The story took on a life of its own before I had the chance to shut it down. And I should have shut it down. But then Cove’s new publicist, Victoria Hale, caught wind of the whole thing and instead of issuing a statement to deny the rumors, she leaned into them. According to Victoria, this is just what the company needs right now. Good news. Even if none of it is true.

After the past year, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring narratives that work in our favor. Cove weathered a PR storm that put the company under a microscope, forcing us to rebuild trust piece by piece. And just as the dust of that crisis started to settle, my past came back to haunt me—an arrest from my senior year of high school that threatened to tarnish not only my name, but the brand my brothers have worked so hard to build.

It’s something I’ve been trying to leave behind me for a very long time. When I was 18, a couple of guys I grew up with—guys I thought were my best friends—decided it would be a good idea to break into one of the older houses in town. They thought it would be harmless, something stupid they could laugh about after. So, they went in through a basement window one night and pocketed cash and some jewelry and then they took off—but not before the old guy who lived there walked in and was so terrified he just about had a heart attack.

I didn’t know anything about it until I saw them running down the street while I was on my way home that night. They flagged me down, asking for a ride like they had a hundred times before. I gave them one without asking any questions, didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t find out what they had done until the next day when the police started knocking on doors. There was security footage of my car near the house, a timeline that lined up just well enough to make it believable, and a reputation that didn’t exactly work in my favor. The Winters name already carried weight in this town, and not the kind that helps. My dad was an alcoholic—after our mom died when we were kids, he lost his job and started spending more time at the bar than he did at home. My brothers and I were basically left to raise ourselves, and people in this town assumed they knew who we’d grow up to be. My arrest was the proof they’d been waiting for.