BOOKS BY LOUISE BAY

All Louise Bay Books are available for free in Kindle Unlimited or on Amazon to buy.

Each book is a stand alone

The Colorado Club Billionaires

Love Fast

Love Deep

Love More

The New York City Billionaires

The Boss + The Maid = Chemistry

The Player + The Pact = I Do

The Hero + Vegas = No Regrets

The Doctors Series

Dr. Off Limits

Dr. Perfect

Dr. CEO

Dr. Fake Fiancé

Dr. Single Dad

The Mister Series

Mr. Mayfair

Mr. Knightsbridge

Mr. Smithfield

Mr. Park Lane

Mr. Bloomsbury

Mr. Notting Hill

The Player Series

International Player

Private Player

The Gentleman Series

The Ruthless Gentleman

The Wrong Gentleman

The Royals Series

King of Wall Street

Park Avenue Prince

Duke of Manhattan

The British Knight

The Earl of London

The Nights Series

Indigo Nights

Promised Nights

Parisian Nights

Standalones

An American in London

14 Days of Christmas

Hollywood Scandal

Love Unexpected

Hopeful

The Empire State Series

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ONE

Rosey

The mirror reveals my three younger sisters in bias-cut, peacock-green satin, sucking in their cheeks and taking selfies. It also reveals a snow-white veil draping over my bared shoulders down to perfectly manicured fingertips. I should be the one giggling with excitement, unable to sit still for anticipation.

After all, this is my wedding day.

Frank might be older, and I might not exactly love him, but I’m grateful to him, and that’s almost love, isn’t it?

I take in a breath, the bones in my corset pressing against my rib cage. I’m so lucky, I remind myself. I’m never going to have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. I’m not going to have to tell my children not to make a sound when Mr. McAlister bangs on the door of the trailer, looking for rent. I get to live in a house with a yard and a top-loading washer. Frank says we’re traveling overseas for our honeymoon. He’s keeping the destination a secret. I’ve never even made it across the border into California. Never been on an airplane. Before Frank, I’d never been to the grocery store and not had to do mental arithmetic as I added every item to my cart to ensure I had enough money to cover the necessities. Marriage to Frank promises so much.

I. Am. So. Lucky.

Except, no matter how many times I say it to myself, how much I will myself to feel it, I can’t drown out the voices screaming at me, telling me I shouldn’t be walking down the aisle in thirty minutes.

“Are you going to get pregnant right away?” Lydia asks out of nowhere. “Cement the deal?”

The room tilts a little and I close my eyes. A child? The boning in my corset is going to leave bruises. Everything’s just so tight. I can’t breathe.

My sisters are happy to accept the niceties that come with me dating the co-owner of the second-biggest car dealership in Eugene, Oregon. They know this isn’t a love match. It doesn’t occur to them that it should be. Frank’s been generous with my family. When we started dating, he obviously felt he had to seduce the entire family. He gave Kitty a job and had a chat with the sheriff when she got caught up in an argument with her boyfriend. He took all five of us out for dinner after our fifth date, and bought everyone Christmas presents three months later, after he insisted everyone spend the holiday at his house.

And when he proposed, he also announced he’d bought the trailer we’d grown up in, and gave it to me as an early wedding present—his way of making sure my family was taken care of. Frank is kind. He’s generous. I could do a lot worse.

So why aren’t I looking forward to being married to him? Having a child with him?

My mother comes out of the bathroom. She’s wearing lipstick, which I’ve only witnessed two other times in my life. She’s wearing a long, pastel-blue dress that looks like it was meant for someone else. It’s just so formal. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so unlike themselves. I look down at my gown. Maybe the congregation will feel the same way when they see me dressed up like this.

She meets my eyes in the mirror and pulls back her shoulders, like she does when someone accuses her of something. “You look beautiful, Rosey. You always do. A smile would complete the picture.” It’s an accusation in disguise: Why aren’t you excited that you’ve landed a man like Frank Goad? You’re going to have a charmed life. It’s good for your whole family.

But she doesn’t say it, because if she does, I might disagree with her. She won’t risk it. She always told me my face would be my fortune. And in her eyes, this day confirms it. I’m marrying into money.

I nod and force a half smile. “I think I just need some air.”

“Someone open a window,” she calls, but my sisters ignore her. I don’t want an open window. I want to look up at the gray Oregon sky and ask God whether I’m doing the right thing.

Before she can stop me, I gather up my skirt, toss it over my arm, and beeline toward the hotel room door. “I’ll be five minutes,” I call over my shoulder.

“Rosey Williams, come back here,” my mother calls. Her voice closes in on me, and before I can make it out the door, she grabs me. “Get back here.”

“My hair and makeup are done,” I say. “I’m ready. There’s thirty minutes before I need to be downstairs. I just want to talk to Frank about something.” It’s a lie. Frank is the last person I want to see. Despite the way he’s always trying to help me—help us—he’s not the person I’d run to in a crisis. Not that he doesn’t care about me. I think he really does. But the only person I can count on is me. I learned that lesson a long time ago.

“About what?” she hisses. “You’re going to be walking down the aisle to him soon enough.”

There’s a crash behind us and my sisters start assigning blame. In the split second my mother’s distracted, I manage to slip out the door. My heart pounds in my chest like I’ve just escaped a kidnapping. Slamming my whole palm against the elevator call button, I glance back down the corridor. No one’s chasing me. Yet.

The elevator doors spring open immediately, like they’re a getaway car idling at the curb. I expect Frank to be waiting for me in the lobby, but when the doors open, there’s an eerie quiet I wasn’t expecting.

I’m wearing a wedding dress. It’s not like I can fly under the radar, but I casually cross the lobby to the front door like I’m in sweatpants and my Oregon State t-shirt.

I just need some air. Some time to breathe. To think.

I step outside and it’s like there’s a roof on the world, it’s so completely full of low clouds.

“Okay, God,” I say out loud. “I don’t think we’ve actually had this talk. But I need to know whether you think I should be marrying a man twenty years older than me who I don’t love because he bought my mom’s trailer and kept my sister out of jail?”

I wait for a sign. A frog or two falling from the sky. A bird shitting on my dress. Anything.

God doesn’t respond.

I stamp my white pump into the gravel beneath my feet. “Fuck.”

“Need a lift somewhere?” a woman’s voice asks from my left. A figure in a white shirt and black pants pushes off from where she’s leaning against the wall.

Is she talking to me? A woman comes into view and I realize it’s Polly Gifford. We went to high school together, but ran in different circles. From what I heard, she got married at nineteen and had three kids before she turned twenty-three. “Polly?”

She twirls a bunch of keys around her finger and rounds the hood of the cab parked in front of the hotel. “I’ve got an airport pickup.” She shrugs. “I can drop you there.”

My chest lifts as I consider her suggestion. The airport? “Where would I go?”

She chuckles. “The fuck outta here? I don’t know. You just don’t look like you want to be here. You can stay and ask God for guidance, or you can get a free lift to Eugene Airport. Choice is yours.”

A thrill chases down my spine as I consider her offer. My phone is tucked into my bra—the only way to hang on to your phone with three sisters—so I wouldn’t need my wallet. But I don’t even have a jacket.

Or my freaking passport.

My heart sinks. No one’s letting me on an airplane without ID. I chew on the inside of my lip. It’s in the safe in the honeymoon suite—the room I just left. Frank made me apply for my passport when he told me we were going on an overseas trip. Why didn’t I bring it down with me?

Because I wasn’t planning on Polly Gifford offering me a ride out of my life.

Polly taps the roof of the cab. “Enjoy your wedding day, Rosey Williams.” She opens the cab door.

“Wait!” I say. I don’t have a plan. Or a place to go. I just know that I don’t want to get married. Not today. Not to Frank. “I need to grab my ID. It’s upstairs. Can you wait five minutes?”

She looks at her watch. “That’s all I can wait. If you’re not back in five, I’ve gotta go.”

“I’ll be back.” I turn and run across the lobby toward the elevators. “God, if you’re listening, you better have me back down here in five minutes,” I mutter.

The elevator’s waiting and I jump in, suddenly filled with energy and purpose. On the way up to the suite, I don’t second-guess myself. Not once. As much as I like Frank, the idea of me jilting him at the altar isn’t as horrifying as actually marrying him. I can’t go through with it. I just can’t. Maybe I should stay and face the music—look Frank in the eye, listen to my mother’s chastisement and blame. But I can’t face it.

I just need to get away. Escape.

In no time at all, the elevator doors open. Full of determination and a steel I don’t recognize in myself, I let myself back into the honeymoon suite, hoping no one notices.

“Oh, you’re back, finally,” Mom says, from the chair where Kitty did my hair. Armed with a can of hairspray and a teasing comb, Kitty stands over Mom. Anything could be about to happen.

“I gotta get Frank my passport,” I say, heading for the safe. “He needs it to check us in apparently.”

“You saw him?” she asks, horrified, only narrowly missing a squirt of hairspray to the eye.

I type in the code to the safe but it doesn’t open. Shit. This is all I need. I can’t have forgotten the code. That can’t be God’s plan for me. The idea of a trip to the airport fills me with such relief, getting stuck here can’t be my destiny.

“No, I ran into Pete in the lobby. He’s gonna get it to Frank.”

“Well, why didn’t he come up to get it? He can’t expect you to be wandering around in…”

I tune Mom out and type in the code again. This time the click of the lock feels like I’ve reached the summit of a roller coaster. My hands start to shake. I’m excited and terrified at the same time.

I pull out my passport and hold it up toward Mom, careful not to let my driver’s license slip out from the pages where I stuffed it last night. “It’s fine, Mom. It gives me something to do so I don’t get nervous.” I eye my purse next to the window, but I can’t risk taking it. Mom will know something’s up.

She rolls her eyes, and Lydia takes her attention by asking her to referee an argument she’s having with Kitty.

I take in the scene. My mom, snapping at Kitty and trying to cajole Marion into standing up so she doesn’t wrinkle her dress. Kitty and Lydia trade insults like they’re playing snap like we did when we were younger during endless rainy days stuck in the trailer. The suite is twice as big as the trailer I’ve called home for all twenty-eight years of my life, but it’s still too small for all of us. We’ve spent our lives on top of each other, arguing, competing, surviving.

I’m done.

I curl my hand around my passport, grab Lydia’s gray hoodie from where it’s slung on the back of a chair, and slip out.

I race toward the elevator, stuffing my passport into my bra. If I run into anyone, I don’t want to have to explain why I’m holding it.

As I get into the elevator, I press the down button a thousand times in the hopes it will get me to the lobby faster. After all this, I don’t want Polly to have driven off, but as I get to the first floor, I see the amber plastic light of her cab over the flower arrangement in the lobby. I take in a breath. This is it. I made it.

I keep my head down, like anyone’s going to miss the girl in the white dress sprinting toward the exit.

“Excuse me!” someone calls behind me, but I pretend I haven’t heard them. I need to get to Polly. I need to get out of here.

Polly must see me coming, because she opens the passenger door. I’m just a couple of yards from the exit when I feel a hand on my arm and my heart sinks.

I stop and turn, accepting defeat.

I’ve been caught.

When I look up, I expect to see Frank staring back at me—but it’s a small man with jet-black hair who I don’t recognize. “You dropped this,” he says, handing me Lydia’s hoodie.

I laugh. I’m still free. “Thank you!” I say, beaming at him.

I forget any pretense of making a graceful exit. I run to the cab, to Polly, to freedom.

Nothing, not even God, is going to stop me.

TWO

Byron

When I left my hometown of Star Falls, Colorado, nearly fifteen years ago, I never thought I’d be back. Not even for the holidays. I knew I didn’t belong here. Which is why it’s so surprising that being back feels… not as strange as I expected it to. And the plaid shirt I’m wearing feels oddly comfortable. I don’t know why I kept it all these years. I found it at the back of my closet in New York and stuffed it in my luggage, reasoning that I’d seen eighteen Januarys in Star Falls and none of them were warm.

I upend my suitcase on the floor and start to unpack. Every time I’ve been back here over the last two years, I’ve always lived out of my luggage. But this trip feels more permanent. Not that I’m back for good—hell no—but I’ll be staying longer than I have on any of my previous trips. Eventually, I’ll move from the cabin I’ve rented into one of the lodges at the Colorado Club—the billionaires’ playground I’m constructing on the edge of town, a little way up the mountain. I want the construction workers to focus on the lodges that will be bought or rented by the centimillionaires and billionaires who will attend the Club’s grand opening at the end of next month.

My personal accommodations can wait.

I can’t bring myself to put on the cowboy hat and boots that are almost mandatory in Star Falls, but I put on the steel-toe boots I had couriered from Safety With Us in Brooklyn to my apartment in Tribeca, and my Colorado Rockies baseball hat I’ve had since I was a kid. I make a mental note to scuff my shoes up a little before I go into Grizzly’s tonight. The leather practically gleams, they’re so new.

Going to the only bar in town, if you don’t count the Snowdrop Inn—which I don’t—isn’t something I’ve done since I’ve been back in town. And apparently, it’s been noticed. I should have known my every move in Star Falls would be carefully catalogued, but I’ve had other things on my mind—like the fact I’m sinking my entire fortune into the Colorado Club.

When I asked Hart McEvoy, the Club’s general manager, why we weren’t getting more local applicants for all the jobs we’re advertising, he informed me that there’s still local hostility toward the Club. We have hundreds of positions to fill, and although many of them have been taken by people from across the state who will live in staff housing, I need local people to be part of the Club, too. They’ll be more reliable and less likely to leave.

It irritates the shit out of me that people are being so short-sighted.

I’m here, bringing jobs, bringing life to the town, and people still find a reason to bitch and moan. I need to win them over. My worn jeans and new boots are part of my I’m-a-local-guy persona. I grew up here. I am local. It just doesn’t feel like it, since I’ve been away almost half my life. New York feels like it’s always been home. Star Falls is just the name of a place on my passport that reminds me where I was born.

I lace up my shoes, lock up. Not that there’s any danger of a burglary in Star Falls. It’s dark out and I can only just see the tops of the familiar mountains I know cut through the clear sky all around me.

The one thing New York City doesn’t have is a sky like the one over Star Falls. The fucking stars always get to me. Every time. Even when I lived here and had never seen another sky, I knew the one I was born under was special. It never gets fully dark here because of all the goddamn stars. There’s no doubt it’s beautiful.

I slide into my truck and head the mile into town toward Grizzly’s. I just want to show my face. And maybe accidently run into a few people. Star Falls understood what an influencer was long before social media was born. I figure if I can get certain big personalities in town on board with the Colorado Club, the “local resistance” will melt away and Hart will have people lining up for all the jobs we have to fill.

My first target is Jim Johnson. Or more specifically, his wife, Sue. She’s the most influential person in Star Falls. But I need Jim on board first. I need him to soften up the ground for me before I try to get Sue to change her mind about the Colorado Club.

I pull up outside Grizzly’s and realize I haven’t scuffed up my shoes. People are going to clock my spotless boots as soon as I walk in the place and label me a city boy. Which I am. Except tonight, I’m trying to win people over. Or at least not alienate more of them.

The ground is frozen, and there’s not much boot-dirtying mud around, but after kicking my tires and stepping on my own feet, the leather no longer gleams like a flashlight with new batteries. Hopefully no one saw me. I hate to think of the rumors this town could invent if anyone saw me trying to scuff my own boots.

I left town before I could legally drink, so I only ever went into Grizzly’s to look for my father. I open the door and am instantly transported back twenty years. The scent of stale beer and the crack of pool balls brings me to fourteen again, desperate to find my father. My mom had collapsed and I’d gone to fetch Dad. But he hadn’t been at Grizzly’s. Or maybe he’d been in the back playing poker. Losing at poker, knowing him.

I head straight to the bar, slide onto one of the tan leather stools and order a beer. The bartender is young, skinny with a tattoo of what could be a Chinese dragon in red ink on his arm. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him. Suits me just fine.

One of the reasons I haven’t come into town over the last couple of years when I’ve been back overseeing things at the Colorado Club is because I don’t have any connections in this place. My dad was found dead a couple of towns away after a bar fight. My mother remarried three years later while I was in New York and moved to Southern California with my sister, Mary. There’s nothing here for me.

“One beer coming right up, Byron,” the bartender says. Maybe I don’t know him, but apparently he knows me.

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