1
LENA
“Shite!”
If there was one thing I’d learned after seven years of working for Weston Kincaid, the Scottish former-tech-guru-turned-energy mogul, it was to steer clear of the man once he started addingbloodyto his swear words. Shite was fine. Calling someone a bawbag…well, no one else in Texas actually knew what that meant, so it wasn’t a problem. Saying a meeting was pure pish…people could make a good guess at that one, but no one seemed to mind because Weston never seemed all that upset when he said it. But once?—
“Bloody fecking shite!”
Yep, once “bloody” started popping out, it was not the time to approach him with files that needed signatures, HR requests, or the reminder of my upcoming time off. It was time to solve problems, redirect non-urgent business, and push unsuspecting citizens out of his warpath—skills I’d honed into a fine art form.
I signed off my email—Lena Harp, personal assistant—just as the door to the adjoining room flew open, and I glanced upfrom my desk. Weston stood in the doorway of his office, dark hair mussed by tense fingers, steel-cut jaw on edge, his nostrils flaring.
“I take it the meeting didn’t go well?” I said, preparing to take notes.
“I hate solicitors!” He stalked across the top floor of Kincaid Energy’s Houston office, retrieving a paper from the printer. “It’s a mess. It’s all a bloody fecking mess! Wasn’t Grandad having a will supposed to make my life easier?”
“That’s the general idea,” I said, watching his scowl darken.
“Well, it’s not!” he snapped.
“What did the lawyer say?” I asked patiently. He wasn’t usually the kind of boss that shouted. He preferred a good, intense glare when trying to break people. But he’d been understandably out of sorts and on edge since losing Grandad Pete. “Is your grandfather forcing you and Jasper to share Lochbrae?”
Weston hissed at the sound of his much-hated cousin’s name. “That would almost be easier. No, the estate’s mine—conditionally.”
“Well, what’s the condition?”
“I have to get married.”
Brooding Scottish billionaire say what? I blinked, my eyes flicking from those thick brows, coiled tight across his forehead, to the ticking muscle in his jaw, certain I’d misheard him. “Excuse me? You have to?—”
“Get married,” he repeated. He strode toward my desk, paper in hand, like this was a perfectly normal Tuesday morning. He thrust the paper in my direction.
I was so caught off guard that I forgot my rule and inhaled, drawing in a deep whiff of that damn cologne that always muddled my head. It was spicy and smoky and put all sorts of thoughts in my head.Goddamnit. I pinched my arm to get my head back in the game and took hold of the paper, blinking down at what looked to be a copy of Peter Kincaid’s will. The legalese was dense, but I’d gotten good at parsing through it after years of reading the contracts that came through Weston’s inbox. I scanned the page, my eyes running over the words again and again. It was all there in black and white.Provided that Weston Kincaid shall be lawfully married within 30 days of my death…Holy shit.
“Grandad gave me a month to sort it?—”
“Less than that now. It’s thirty days from his death,” I pointed out. We both knew it had already been a couple days.
“Exactly!” he growled. “I forfeit the entire Scotland estate if I can’t produce a wife and hand over a marriage certificate to the solicitor’s office in Braeburn in that time. All of Lochbrae would go to Jasper.”
I rubbed the side of my head, already feeling a boatload of work coming my way. Work I didn’t have time for!Ughhhh. I was trying to tie everything up in neat bows for Weston before my time off next week. His grandfather passing had been a shock—one even I had felt, despite mostly knowing Pete Kincaid through phone calls—but we were handling it, and I’d already managed to line everything up for him to return to Scotland to attend the funeral.
But this! This wasn’t just some little problem. When exactly was I supposed to find him a wife? Okay, that sounded ludicrous despite the things I’d done for Weston over the years, but I wasn’t so naive as to think he’d handle this on his own.
“When you say—” My words were cut off by the sight of Weston rolling his shirt sleeves down, depriving me of the view of his toned forearms. Bad move on his part—you’d think someone with his genius-level IQ would have realized I had a much harder time standing strong against him when those forearms were in view.
But if he wanted to make it easier for me to keep a clear head, that was fine by me. Maybe he thought he looked more authoritative and in charge with his cuffs buttoned and his jacket on—and if he thought that, he wasn’t exactly wrong. But as he slipped on the suit jacket—black, as all of his suits had been since he’d gotten the news of his grandfather’s death—he looked like the untouchable billionaire he was.
Myweakness was for the man underneath the bespoke, the one few people got to see.
But there was no need for him to know that.
He straightened to his full six-foot-two, pinning me in place with those sharp, penetrating eyes.
“We’ll have to get married,” he said.
My thoughts short circuited. What the hell was he talking about?
