My Bereaved Billionaire: A Clean Billionaire Romance (My Billionaire A-Z Book 2) Read online

  A Billionaire Books Ltd Ebook.

  Copyright © 2018 by Katie Evergreen

  All rights reserved.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  For Gran

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Coming Soon!

  1

  2

  1

  Liberty Reynolds sighed as the guest bell rang out from the lobby. She tried to tame her corkscrew curls back into their hairband, but after a day of changing beds little blonde ringlets were poking out all over the place. Giving up, she took a deep breath and swung open the door.

  “Welcome to Pebble Cove Motel!” Liberty’s voice sang as she tried to beam her widest smile. “How may I help you?”

  With the latest pair of guests happily settled in their little ocean-view room, Liberty trudged wearily back down the two stairways, through the door at the front desk, and into the tiny office that lay behind. The accounts ledger sat where she’d left it, open at a page that looked identical to all the rest—scrawled in ink and almost completely illegible. Liberty couldn’t believe that people still did their finances by hand, let alone using a fountain pen and ink. They were a mess. And now they were her mess.

  Releasing the curls that hadn’t already escaped, Liberty ran her hands through her hair and set about trying to decipher the figures in front of her. This was the part of the job she didn’t mind. Numbers were her thing, not people. When she had to talk to people, particularly to new people, Liberty’s insides went as curly as her hair. Not that she had much choice at the moment, seeing as all of the jobs at Pebble Cove were falling at her feet.

  A timid knock drew Liberty’s attention away from the pages.

  “Yes?” she said, and the door creaked open. A shock of red hair appeared, and the tanned, freckly face hidden underneath looked nervously at the floor.

  “Sorry to interrupt you, ma’am, but it looks like there’s a leak in the shower of number six, and the people in number eight have asked for a wake-up call with the LN News at half five tomorrow morning.”

  “Thanks, Ginger,” said Liberty, trying not to cry at the thought of yet more work. “Is Fred about? Could he look at the leak for me?”

  Ginger shook her head and Liberty didn’t want to ask why. The young girl looked like she had suffered enough after one conversation.

  “Okay, is that you done for the day then?” she asked instead. Ginger nodded, running away before Liberty had the chance to say goodnight.

  Ginger and her twin brother, Fred, had both been working at Pebble Cove for the last two years, and the only reason they’d got the job was because this was a small beach town with hardly any residents, and even fewer who wanted to work at a run-down motel with an infestation problem.

  Liberty had been blown away when she’d met them. She thought she had a problem with the general public, but these two were off the scale. Ginger couldn’t meet anyone’s eye without her face turning the colour of a California sunset, and Fred was just plain rude. Liberty wasn’t even sure they were working at the motel legally because their collective age looked less than Liberty’s, and she was only 22.

  She sighed. If someone had said to her a few weeks ago that she’d be back in her home town working in her childhood home, she’d have chuckled in their face. Because just a few weeks ago, Liberty had been part of a large finance team in an even larger marketing company—a million miles away from Little Norwich and its singular holiday destination. Fresh out of university with a First-Class Honors degree in economics and math, the whole world had been at her feet. Now, there was a mop and a bucket with room six written all over it.

  Liberty closed the ledger and placed it back with the others in the rusting file cabinet. Fixing the squeaky drawers was on her to-do list—a list that was already longer than her arm—but Liberty had been trying to prioritize the most important issues, and the tiny airless office was the least of her worries. She walked into the lobby, hoping to catch some of the dying sunlight. It should be a beautiful sight, but down here the pinks and oranges of the day were sucked away by all the dark wood of the motel.

  Checking her cell for the first time that day, she sighed as she saw an abundance of messages from her old life away from Pebble Cove. Her best friend from university, Bronwyn, had secured a position at the same company as Liberty and was sending updates on office gossip every hour. Liberty giggled as she read about their uptight supervisor’s mishap with the water cooler. There were also a few messages from Brett, who Liberty had fallen into a relationship with without really realizing it. He’d been asking when she was coming back since she first sat at the wheel of her battered old Chevy and started the journey here.

  Liberty pushed open the heavy wooden front door and stepped out onto the porch that ran along the length of the motel. She picked her way over the broken floorboards and safely to the stairs, stopping at the bottom step to sit down. It had been her favorite place to sit when she was a kid. The silver-streaked ocean stretched out before her—a short walk down a little pebbled path and across a stretch of sandy beach and she’d be dipping her toes in the Pacific. Back then she would sit and listen to her mom play the piano, the notes carrying through the open window, her dad whistling as he cooked up a feast for them both. She would spend hours in the water, swimming as far as she would dare before diving under the waves to pretend she was a mermaid. It had been idyllic.

  Liberty turned her head back to the beautiful building and sighed—she had been doing a lot of that recently. It was so far from idyllic now. All she wanted to do was run from these steps and not look back, like she thought she had done years ago. But this time she couldn’t. Her dad was in hospital, and she was the only one left to look after Pebble Cove.
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  She was stuck here whether she liked it or not.

  2

  “Okay, okay. Let’s kill her off. Your wife has done you proud, Nate, but perhaps it’s time you started living your own life now?”

  Nathaniel Parker let out a sound that was halfway between a sob and a laugh. He felt the tension release from his shoulders as he dropped his head to his hands, his elbows propped up on the boardroom table—which seemed enormous with only two people sitting at it.

  “Thank you, Tilly,” Nate said through his hands. “I promise I won’t let you down,”

  Matilda Arnold chewed the end of her pencil like a child, belying her actual age—which was still a mystery to Nate even after all the years she’d worked for him.

  “We need a good way to do it, though,” Tilly said. “Nothing too gruesome or morbid. We don’t want to draw attention to the death, we just want it to happen and then, as time passes, people forget.”

  Tilly shook her head, her immaculate brown bob immobile despite the movement. She swiveled her chair from side to side the way she always did when she was deep in thought.

  “Whose crazy idea was it for you to get fake-married to a fictional woman in the first place?” she said as she stopped her chair and looked at Nate, a smile dancing on her lips.

  Nate lifted his head and smiled at her.

  “I seem to remember a certain someone, Matilda Arnold, telling me that—now what was it exactly?—‘No sensible investor will pay into a company designed to find people their true love when it’s run by a single guy barely into his 20’s. Especially one with a dad well known for his philandering ways. We need to make you a loving, caring, devoted husband, even if we have to invent you a wife for that to happen.’ Does that sound familiar?”

  “Yes,” Tilly replied. “And you love me for it, don’t you, Nate? Because without that crazy idea of mine you may not be where you are today, sitting up here with a few billion dollars in the bank.”

  “As a mentor, you have been one of the better ones.” Nate’s lips drew up at one side, making his cheek dimple. Tilly threw the chewed pencil at him in jest, his quick reactions preventing the wet end from hitting him in the face.

  “That’s like a parent telling their only child they’re the favorite,” she said, laughing.

  Nate rose from his padded desk chair at the head of the boardroom table and walked to the door. He looked through the glass at the buzzing office outside. For as far as he could see were rows of desks, and all of the people sat there were working for him. Even six years into the business, the view made him proud.

  He adjusted his focus and saw himself reflected in the glass. At 28 he knew he looked good, but he had the unfair advantage of being able to afford his own personal trainer and chef. His genes had bestowed him with a height of 6’2”, and a thick head of dark hair. He had inherited his looks from his dad, but as much as he looked like Nathaniel Parker Snr, Nate had gone out of his way to not act like him. The bright blue eyes he had from his mother’s side of the family, and her boundless kindness and compassion, were what set him apart from the whole of the Parker family.

  It was exactly this kindness and compassion that had inspired his company, Forevercom. The dating website wasn’t there to provide its clients with immediate access to other people’s bodies. There were criteria that Nate had written into the software that meant the users of Forevercom needed to match with their potential partners on deep rooted beliefs and ideals, not just looks and proximity. They had to be in contact for at least a month before any real names or addresses were allowed to be exchanged, and any attempts to undermine this were caught by a clever piece of software that was Nate’s pride and joy. People trying to cheat the system were automatically removed from the site and excluded forever.

  In short, Nate had wanted the site to provide users with everything his dad couldn’t provide his mom: loyalty, commitment, and love. As a result of the intricate coding, Forevercom was one of the most expensive sites out there. When he was starting out, he’d worried that this may be a problem. But it seemed to have had the opposite effect, because it was now one of the world’s most visited websites. People trusted Forevercom, and people trusted Nate. Which was one of the reasons both himself and Tilly were sat in the gigantic boardroom trying to come up with a plan to allow Nate to stop living a lie.

  Nobody outside of the majority shareholders of Forevercom—Nate and Tilly—plus Nate’s immediate family, which consisted of his dad, his two brothers and their wives, knew that Nate wasn’t really married. It was a small lie which had grown and grown, and now all the official sources claimed that Nate had been happily married for six years. Except Nate hadn’t been happily married at all, he hadn’t even been allowed to date in case the investors realized what he was doing and the story leaked to the press. It wasn’t as though Nate had a huge online presence, he kept his profile low and allowed his company to do all of the talking. But he had never been allowed to meet ‘the one’ because he couldn’t let his cover slip, and he certainly couldn’t trust anyone not to sell him out.

  Tilly handled all of his PR work, and he had only indulged in a few articles and interviews himself. Nate wasn’t the type of person who liked being splashed across the papers or the glossy pages of magazines, which was a shame as he certainly had the looks to sell them. No, he liked to keep himself to himself. But he did miss the ability to share everything he had with someone special. He longed to go on dates with a woman he could talk to about everything and anything. He had Tilly, of course, but he loved her like an aunt. She was no substitute for a romantic partner.

  Finally, though, if he played his cards right, he would be allowed to find himself a soul mate.

  Tilly came to join him at the door.

  “I don’t think we should have the funeral and gathering in the city, there are too many people who would want to come,” she said. “You don’t think that’s too unfair on them, do you?”

  “No,” Nate said. “I don’t want it to be a big thing. We can’t even have a real funeral, we’ll have to make do with the gathering afterward and hope that’s enough to show the world she’s gone. Maybe we could hold something small in the town that Marie came from. I don’t know anyone who would make that trip. Can you remember where we said that was?”

  “I remember sticking a pin in a map,” said Tilly, sitting back at the table and tapping away on her laptop. “Ah, here we go. It was a place in the middle of nowhere, perfect.”

  Nate came around behind her and read over her shoulder.

  “Little Norwich?” he said, picking up his phone. “Okay, leave it with me.”

  3

  “Do you know just how selfish you’re being, baby?”

  Liberty had her phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder as she scrubbed at the toilet in room six. She was trying to concentrate on what Brett was saying to her, but she’d been up at the crack of dawn to deliver a newspaper to the Kellers, and it was now almost noon. She hadn’t even had breakfast yet.

  “I’m sorry, Brett. You know I’d come back if I could, but dad’s still in hospital. His stroke means that he’s having to relearn everything from scratch.”

  Liberty felt the words stick in her throat, but there was no way she was going to start crying on the phone to Brett. He already thought she was weak, he’d told her so on their third date when her eyes had pricked with tears at the sight of a stray dog begging for scraps.

  She pictured her dad in his hospital bed, thinner than she’d ever seen him and totally unable to use the right-hand side of his body. The nurses had been feeding him and washing him. They were even having to help him go to the toilet. Liberty’s dad had been her rock since mom had died, and even before that, and now he was helpless. She’d had no choice but to move back to Little Norwich and take over the running of Pebble Cove. She was an only child, there was nobody else who could do it.

  Besides, as she kept reminding herself now she was home, there really were no permanent ties to he
r life in San Diego. Yes, she had her fabulous new job and her best friend there, and of course Brett, who was counting the days they’d been together like a child with a reward chart. But this was her home, and her dad needed her.

  When Liberty had arrived at the hospital, she had fallen to her knees at the sight of her dad asleep in the bed. Nothing had prepared her for that—he looked like a stranger. She had gone into automatic pilot, and she was still in it. If she turned it off she would have to face the reality of what lay ahead, and she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to do that. Not again.

  “Libby, baby, you still there?” Brett’s tinny voice brought her back to the here and now, and the toilet in front of her nose.

  She wrestled with the idea of once again telling him that she didn’t like being called Libby—her dad’s, and only her dad’s, pet name for her—but decided that would rile him further.

  “Yes, sorry. I’m just in the middle of scru—”

  “Like I said,” Brett interrupted Liberty’s apology. “You’re being so selfish. How do you think I feel here all by myself?”

  Liberty could hear a hubbub of noise in the background of the call and very much doubted that Brett was alone. He wasn’t like her. Liberty could be surrounded by people and still feel lonely.

  Brett had looked after her, really, when she’d started working at TRN Associates. He had spotted her on her first day in the large company and swooped in to rescue her when she’d dropped her folder on the stairwell. He’d been at her side ever since. He had decided their anniversary could be the day they had walked to the subway and ridden home together. He’d planned all their dates, and even sent a bunch of roses to her desk at work to celebrate their monthiversary every time it came around. Liberty had fallen into the relationship reluctantly, but felt she owed it to Brett as he seemed to be giving it his all.