Fake Married to My Billionaire CEO novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Zero Balance
Lacey's savings vanish an hour before her wedding, and she marries a stranger in front of her ex. The clerk reads his name aloud and she signs anyway.
At 3:40 on my wedding day, the chapel had thirty-eight guests and no groom.
I stood in the bride's room in a dress I had paid for in cash.
My phone showed the savings app.
It said $0.00.
I refreshed it twice.
Forty-one thousand, two hundred dollars had been sitting there on Thursday morning.
It was my duplex down payment, four years of tips and double shifts at the front desk.
Dean's name was on the account because he had asked me to put it there.
A text came in while I was staring.
"Don't make it ugly, Lace. I needed it more than you did."
I read it once and sat down on the little velvet stool.
My mother knocked and came in with her purse already open.
She is fifty-six and carries enough tissues for a funeral.
"He's not answering," she said.
"He won't," I said. "He took the money."
She said a word I had never heard her say.
Then she took my hand and asked what I wanted to do.
I wanted to go out there and tell thirty-eight people myself.
So I did.
The chapel on Las Vegas Boulevard has a white aisle and plastic roses.
My cousins had flown in from Reno, and two girls from the desk had swapped shifts to come.
I stood at the front in my dress and said it plainly.
"Dean isn't coming. He cleaned out my savings last night. You can eat the cake anyway."
Nobody moved.
Somebody's baby started to cry.
A man in a worn gray jacket sat alone in the last pew.
He had a paper cup of coffee and the look of someone who had wandered in out of the heat.
He was the only person in the room who didn't look at me with pity.
He looked at me.
At 4:20 the doors banged open.
Dean walked in wearing the suit I had helped him pick.
A woman in a green dress had her hand tucked in his arm.
He had a new watch on his wrist, gold, the size of a coaster.
"Lace," he said, in the voice he used on customers at the car lot. "Don't be dramatic."
"You're late," I said.
"I'm here to be mature about it."
He took a ring box from his pocket and held it out.
It was the ring I had paid for half of.
"Keep it," he said. "For the sake of the guests. Call it a gift."
The woman in green laughed behind her hand.
My cousin stood up and my mother caught his sleeve.
Thirty-eight people waited for me to cry.
I felt it coming, hot and stupid, right behind my eyes.
I looked past Dean, down the aisle, at the only face that wasn't staring.
The man in the gray jacket lifted his coffee an inch, the way you toast someone in a bar.
"Nice watch," he said, loud enough for the room. "Whose money was it?"
Dean turned around.
"Who the hell are you?"
"The groom," the man said.
He stood up and walked down the aisle.
I had never seen him before in my life.
He was tall, with dark hair, a scar cutting through his left eyebrow, and calm brown eyes.
He stopped beside me and held out his hand without looking at it.
I could have said no.
I could have said thank you, sir, but this is a family matter.
Instead I put my hand in his and said it loud enough for the back row.
"I'm getting married tonight. This is my husband."
Dean laughed, but it came out short.
"You don't even know his name."
"It's Rafferty," the stranger said. "Rafferty Cole. I'm very happy."
My mother made a small sound that might have been a cheer.
Dean opened his mouth and found nothing in it.
The woman in green let go of his arm.
I took the ring box out of his hand and snapped it shut.
"Put the watch back where you found it," I said. "Or I'll tell the whole hotel what it cost."
We left through the side door, my skirt in my fist, with thirty-eight people clapping behind us.
The Clark County bureau was open until midnight, and the line was short.
Rafferty stood next to me at the counter with his hands in his jacket pockets.
"You can still change your mind," he said.
"You can too."
"I don't want to," he said, and he sounded surprised by it.
The clerk was a woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a chain.
She took our IDs and typed without looking up.
"Both of you sign here and here."
She slid the form across the counter and read it back to us in a flat voice, to make sure the spelling was right.
"Lacey Marie Dvorak. Rafferty Edward Wexley."
She looked up over her glasses.
"Wexley, like the hotels?"
"It's a common name," Rafferty said. "I drive a catering van."
I kept my face still.
I have worked the front desk of the Wexley Las Vegas for four years.
The founder's name is on a brass plaque beside my station, and I polish my fingerprints off it every morning.
The owner had never once been seen in the building.
I looked at the man beside me, in his thin gray jacket, holding a paper cup.
Then I picked up the pen.
I knew exactly whose name that was, and I signed anyway.
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