Billionaire Bad Boy's Fake Bride: BWWM Romance Read Online Free PDF Page A

would actually work, but for the moment, he simply needed to secure her agreement. “It’s just for a few weeks. Will you do it?”
    She frowned at him. “I distinctly remember you and your father setting our wedding date for a month from now, Connor, so how is that supposed to work?”
    “Easy. We just go along with everything. We’ll pretend we’re setting up a wedding, and then you can dump me at the last minute, and Dad will be certain my heart is broken and give it a rest for a while. Anyone would need time to recover from devastation like that.” Enthusiastically, he added, “If you jilted me, he’d really feel sorry for me and let me live my own life while saving the company for my sister.”
    She let out a sound of outrage. “Not only do you expect me to pretend to be your fake fiancée and ingratiate myself to your family, but you also expect me to be the bad guy who ends the relationship too?”
    He gave her a puzzled look. “It wouldn’t do anything to soothe my dad, or calm his need for me to settle down right away, if I’m the one who ruins the relationship, would it?” At the shake of her head, he continued on. “It’s much easier for the relationship to disintegrate by your choice. I’ll give you a huge bonus, and when this is all over, we can go back to the way things were.”
    She snorted. “I doubt that, but I don’t think there’s any going back to the way things were after tonight either way, so I guess I’ll help you.”
    He beamed at her. “Excellent. Thank you, Angelina. Just keep the ring on for now, and we’ll figure out all the details of our implosion later. For now, we’ll just play along, right?”
    She seemed perturbed, but she nodded. There was a hint of wary resignation about her when she waved to the door. “Fine, now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to go to bed. It’s been a long and strange day, and I don’t even want to think about what I just agreed to.”
    It was unusual for a woman to rush him out of her house. Usually, she was busy rushing him in the opposite direction, toward her bedroom, but of course it wouldn’t be that way with Angelina. They were business associates, and perhaps they might form a tenuous friendship during their shared trial, but it wasn’t anything more to it than that.
    There couldn’t possibly be, could there? Of course not. He was nowhere near ready to settle down, and she had the kind of responsibilities he didn’t want to think about. This was a short-term business deal for both of them, and though he hoped to retain her as assistant when it ended, he would sacrifice that relationship if necessary to keep his father’s health stable.
    He was feeling considerably lighter—though he knew he wasn’t as close to a solution as he had presented to her—as he left Angelina’s house a few minutes later and got behind the wheel of his car to drive away. He’d made it seem cut and dried, basically a simple matter of staging a relationship that didn’t exist and turning it into a breakup from hell, with her cast as the villain, and that leading to his father easing up on the demand for marriage.
    He had a feeling William wouldn’t be so easy to fool, and it wouldn’t be quite so easy to break up their fake relationship, but he wasn’t going to reveal that to Angelina until he absolutely had to. Why make things more complicated sooner than he had to?
    ***
    Could things get more complicated? Despite her tiredness from a long day—which had been a rough one for Kevin, meaning it was a rough day for her—followed by the continuous shocks that had started from the moment she answered her boss’s call, she couldn’t seem to fall asleep.
    Instead, she tossed and turned while fretting about the agreement she had reached with Connor, knowing it was wrong on so many levels, but also unable to coolly and firmly tell him no and refuse to help him. She tried to tell herself it was for his father’s sake, but she couldn’t fully embrace