My Groom Tried to Steal My Family Empire Through Marriage novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Terrace Doors
Two hours before the ceremony Brynn watches her groom and her cousin plot her family's company on a security feed, and walks down the aisle to show five hundred guests.
Five hundred guests were already seated on the Wentworth Tower terrace when Brice Kincade knocked on my bridal suite door.
He wasn't dressed like a guest.
He wore all black with his sleeves pushed to his elbows, and he had a tablet under his arm.
"Brynn, I need two minutes. Alone."
My cousin Marissa looked up from my hem with a pin between her lips. "She walks in forty minutes, Brice."
She was in ivory satin, not the dusty blue we had picked for the bridesmaids.
The dye had run, she'd told me that morning, and she had cried about it for an hour.
I had told her it was fine.
"Two minutes," I said.
Marissa squeezed my ankle and went to find me some water.
Brice shut the door and set the tablet on the vanity.
Black ink covered his hand to the knuckles, and he kept it flat on the glass until the screen woke up.
"Your guest list had eleven names my team couldn't place," he said. "So I put cameras in the service corridors."
"Mom told you not to hire your own people at all."
"She did." He tilted the tablet toward me. "This is the supply room, twenty minutes ago."
The picture was grainy but clear.
My groom had his tuxedo jacket off, and my cousin had her back against a rack of folded tablecloths.
Preston kissed her.
Then he said, in his easy, warm voice, "Monday morning the board sees both our signatures on the proxy."
"Then her forty-one percent is yours to vote," Marissa said.
"Exactly. Brynn has never suspected anything. She cried at her father's grave and then asked me to move in."
Marissa laughed. "Eleven months of holding her hand."
"The wedding is the part that makes it legal. After that she can cry all she likes."
Brice stopped the feed.
I looked down at my hands and the ring on the left one, the pale blue stone I had been so proud to show my mother.
My phone buzzed on the vanity.
It was Mom. "Everything is perfect, darling. Breathe. Trust Preston. He loves you so much."
I read it twice.
Mom had moved the wedding up six weeks so it would happen before the board met.
Dad would have wanted that, she'd said.
She had waved away the prenup lawyers too.
Family doesn't need paper, she'd said.
On Thursday she had slid a stack of venue forms across her desk, and I had signed wherever the yellow flags were.
I hadn't signed a single thing for Preston.
I checked that twice in my head, standing there in thirty pounds of lace.
"He fooled her too," I said.
Brice said nothing.
"If I cancel in this room, Preston tells the board I had a breakdown, and Marissa cries on cue."
"And on Monday seven people decide who votes your shares," Brice said.
"All seven are on that terrace right now."
I looked at myself in the mirror.
My curls were pinned, my makeup was perfect, and the man who wanted my father's company was waiting for me with flowers.
"So I'm not canceling," I said.
Brice's jaw moved. "Brynn."
"I'm walking out there. Can you put that feed on the three big screens the photographers use?"
"The whole recording?"
"All of it, with the sound up. Start it when I say."
He looked at me for a long moment.
I had known him since I was nineteen, when he stood behind my father at every dinner and never said a word.
"Say the word and it plays," he said.
"Preston will see your crew move."
"They've been standing at those screens all morning. He thinks they're doing the lighting."
Marissa came back with a glass of water and a bright smile.
"Everyone's ready," she said. "You look so beautiful, Brynn."
"Thank you," I said, and I drank every drop.
At ten past four, Brice walked me down the private stairs to the terrace doors.
He stopped in front of me and fixed one curl that had slipped.
His thumb touched my jaw for less than a second.
"I'll be in the back," he said. "I'll be watching his hands."
"Don't stop me."
"I wouldn't dare."
The doors opened, the string quartet began, and five hundred people stood up and turned around.
Everyone was smiling.
I walked down the aisle on the white carpet with my head up and the bouquet in my fist.
My mother, Diane Wentworth, sat in the front row, dabbing her eyes.
The seven board members sat in the second row with their phones put away.
Preston waited under the arch with his hand over his heart.
Marissa stood beside him in ivory, holding a small bouquet of white roses.
"You look perfect," Preston said, and he took both my hands.
The officiant smiled at me. "Are we ready?"
"Almost," I said, loud enough for the first ten rows.
I turned to the crowd.
"Before I say anything else, I'd like all of you to look at the screens."
Preston's smile froze.
The three screens behind us lit up with a supply room and a tuxedo jacket hanging on a chair.
Then his own voice came out of every speaker on the terrace.
"Brynn has never suspected anything."
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