Falling For Her Fake Fiancé. Sarah M. Anderson

trying to earn their trust. But now it was time to lay down the law.

      “Fire every single person who called in sick today.”

      There was a satisfying pause on the other end of the intercom, and, for a moment, Ethan felt a surge of victory.

      The victorious surge was short-lived, however.

      “Mis-ter Logan,” Delores began. “Regretfully, it seems that the HR personnel in charge of processing terminations are out sick today.”

      “Of course they are,” he snapped. He fought the urge to throw the intercom across the room, but that was an impulsive, juvenile thing to do, and Ethan was not impulsive or juvenile. Not anymore.

      So, as unsatisfying as it was, he merely shut off the intercom and glared at his office door.

      He needed a better plan.

      He always had a plan when he went into a business. His method was proven. He could turn a flailing business around in as little as six months.

      But this? The Beaumont freaking Brewery?

      That was the problem, he decided. Everyone—the press, the public, their customers and especially the employees—still thought of this as the Beaumont Brewery. Sure, the business had been under Beaumont management for a good century and a half. That was the reason AllBev, the conglomerate that had hired CRS to handle this reorganization, had chosen to keep the Beaumont name a part of the Brewery—the name-recognition value was through the roof.

      But it wasn’t the Beaumont family’s brewery anymore. They had been forced out months ago. And the sooner the employees realized that, the better.

      He looked around the office. It was beautiful, heavy with history and power.

      He’d heard that the conference table had been custom-made. It was so big and heavy that it’d been built in the actual office—they might have to take a wall out to remove it. Tucked in the far corner by a large coffee table was a grouping of two leather club chairs and a matching leather love seat. The coffee table was supposedly made of one of the original wagon wheels that Phillipe Beaumont had used when he’d crossed the Great Plains with a team of Percheron draft horses back in the 1880s.

      The only signs of the current decade were the flat-screen television that hung over the sitting area and the electronics on the desk, which had been made to match the conference table.

      The entire room screamed Beaumont so loudly he was practically deafened by it.

      He flipped on the hated intercom again. “Delores.”

      “Yes, Mis—”

      He cut her off before she could mangle his name again. “I want to redo the office. I want all this stuff gone. The curtains, the woodwork—and the conference table. All of it.” Some of these pieces—hand carved and well cared for, like the bar—would probably fetch a pretty penny. “Sell it off.”

      There was another satisfying pause.

      “Yes, sir.” For a moment, he thought she sounded subdued—cowed. As if she couldn’t believe he would really dismantle the heart of the Beaumont Brewery. But then she added, “I know just the appraiser to call,” in a tone that sounded...smug?

      He ignored her and went back to his computer. Two lines shut down was not acceptable. If either line didn’t pull double shifts tomorrow, he wouldn’t wait for HR to terminate employees. He’d do it himself.

      After all, he was the boss here. What he said went.

      And that included the furniture.

      * * *

      Frances Beaumont slammed her bedroom door behind her and flopped down on her bed. Another rejection—she couldn’t fall much lower.

      She was tired of this. She’d been forced to move back into the Beaumont mansion after her last project had failed so spectacularly that she’d had to give up her luxury condo in downtown Denver. She’d even been forced to sell most of her designer wardrobe.

      The idea—digital art ownership and crowdsourcing art patronage online by having buyers buy stock in digital art—had been fundamentally sound. Art might be timeless, but art production and collection had to evolve. She’d sunk a considerable portion of her fortune into Art Digitale, as well as every single penny she’d gotten from the sale of the Beaumont Brewery.

      What an epic, crushing mistake. After months of delays and false starts—and huge bills—Art Digitale had been live for three weeks before the funds ran out. Not a single transaction had taken place on the website. In her gilded life, she’d never experienced such complete failure. How could she? She was a Beaumont.

      Her business failure was bad enough. But worse? She couldn’t get a job. It was as if being a Beaumont suddenly counted for nothing. Her first employer, the owner of Galerie Solaria, hadn’t exactly jumped at the chance to have Frances come back, even though Frances knew how to flatter the wealthy, art-focused patrons and massage the delicate egos of artists. She knew how to sell art—didn’t that count for something?

      Plus, she was a Beaumont. A few years ago, people would have jumped at the chance to be associated with one of the founding families of Denver. Frances had been an in-demand woman.

      “Where did I go wrong?” she asked her ceiling.

      Unsurprisingly, it didn’t have an answer.

      She’d just turned thirty. She was broke and had moved back in with her family—her brother Chadwick and his family, plus assorted Beaumonts from her father’s other marriages.

      She shuddered in horror.

      When the family still owned the Brewery, the Beaumont name had meant something. Frances had meant something. But ever since that part of her life had been sold, she’d been...adrift.

      If only there was some way to go back, to put the Brewery under the family’s control again.

      Yes, she thought bitterly, that was definitely an option. Her older brothers Chadwick and Matthew had walked away and started their own brewery, Percheron Drafts. Phillip, her favorite older brother, the one who had gotten her into parties and helped her build her reputation as the Cool Girl of Denver high society, had ensconced himself out on the Beaumont Farm and gotten sober. No more parties with him. And her twin brother, Byron, was starting a new restaurant.

      Everyone else was moving forward, pairing off. And Frances was stuck back in her childhood room, alone.

      Not that she believed a man would solve any of her problems. She’d grown up watching her father burn through marriage after unhappy marriage. No, she knew love didn’t exist. Or if it did, it wasn’t in the cards for her.

      She was on her own here.

      She opened up a message from her friend Becky and stared at the picture of a shuttered storefront. She and Becky had worked together at Galerie Solaria. Becky had no famous last name and no social connections, but she knew art and had a snarky sense of humor that cut through the bull. More to the point, Becky treated Frances like she was a real person, not just a special Beaumont snowflake. They had been friends ever since.

      Becky had a proposition. She wanted to open a new gallery, one that would merge the new-media art forms with the standard classics that wealthy patrons preferred. It wasn’t as avant-garde as Frances’s digital art business had been, but it was a good bridge between the two worlds.

      The only problem was Frances did not have the money to invest. She wished to God she did. She could co-own and comanage the gallery. It wouldn’t bring in big bucks, but it could get her out of the mansion. It could get her back to being a somebody. And not just any somebody. She could go back to being Frances Beaumont—popular, respected, envied.

      She dropped her phone onto the bed in defeat. Right. Another fortune was just going to fall into her lap and she’d be in demand. Sure. And she would also sprout wings.

      True