by Amy Star
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Bear's
FAKE BRIDE
A BILLIONAIRE WEREBEAR ROMANCE
AMY STAR
Copyright ©2018 by Amy Star
All rights reserved.
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About This Book
“A sexy and pretty steamy werebear romance like no other!”
Wealthy WereBear Zeke Croasdell was in an incredibly urgent need of a wife.
His billionaire father was threatening to cut him off from the family inheritance if he did not find a mate soon.
So Zeke paid 23 year old Charlie Harrison to be his wife for long enough for him to claim the money.
However, Charlie had no idea what being with a billionaire werebear would be like.
And she was set to be in for the shock of her life when she found out...
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
“So… you met him… online,” her best friend, Sam, began slowly, her words trickling out one by one in a slightly dubious line. “On a site for introducing sugar babies to their ideal sugar daddies. So you can date some geezer for his money.” Dark eyebrows rose steadily over equally dark eyes. “Am I understanding this right?” she sighed, one mocha-dark hand lifting so she could pinch the bridge of her nose between two fingers.
Charlemagne—Charlie, as she was more commonly called by anyone other than her father—lifted both tanned, golden hands to shrug broadly, her palms facing the ceiling. “Hey, don’t judge. A girl needs to do what a girl needs to do,” she replied smoothly, and she leaned her elbows on the table, laced her fingers together, and propped her narrow chin up on the backs of her hands, red lips pouting. “A fine arts degree costs a lot and brings in basically no money. Either I find someone willing and happy to hand me money, or I’m still going to be paying those loans off by the time I’m seventy-six. And he’s only like seven years older than me.”
She tipped her head to one side, loose auburn curls falling across the back of her neck as she did. “Unless you’ve got several thousand dollars in your back pocket and you want to give it to me…?”
Sam held her hands up as if in surrender and leaned back, before she shoved a few tight black curls out of her face. Slumping back in her seat, she folded her arms over her chest. “I take it the painting gig isn’t working out so well.”
Charlie rolled her eyes and gestured downwards, rather pointedly, to her waitressing uniform. “You think?” She straightened up with a sigh, palms landing on the tabletop. “Anyway, my break is just about done,” she sighed. “I need to go shovel down some lunch while I’ve still got time. I’ll call you tonight after the date.”
Sam pointed a finger at her sharply as she demanded, “And remember to send me a picture of the guy and what you’re wearing before you get there. And the name of the restaurant, too.”
With a snort of laughter, Charlie dragged the tip of one finger in an X-shape over her chest. “I will, I promise,” she assured her fondly as she shoved her chair away from the table and got to her feet.
Sam nodded once, satisfied. “Good. Because if he turns out to be a maniac and kidnaps you, I’d like to be able to tell the cops something a bit more concrete than ‘She was with a guy and wearing clothes at a place.’”
With a final scoff of laughter, Charlie turned to head back to the break room, waving over her shoulder as she walked away. “You worry too much, but I’ll keep you up to speed,” she offered over her shoulder with a sardonic grin, one hand on the break room’s doorframe.
“I worry exactly the right amount,” Sam called after her with a stubborn twist to her mouth before she waved Charlie away.
Charlie blew her a kiss before swinging herself the rest of the way into the break room.
*
Charlie looked good. That was important. Oh, sure, she wanted to actually be able to get along with the guy, but she was under no assumptions that… whatever was going to happen was going to be based purely on some deep, emotional connection. On the whole, she was pretty okay with that. She just wasn’t going to let her dad know about that little detail.
She looked herself over in her mirror one last time. The dress was a deep blue, faintly metallic halter-top, held in place around her neck with a silver collar. It hugged her broad hips, narrow waist, and ample bust well. The skirt flowed around her ankles, and one side of it was slit nearly the whole way up to her right hip.
On her own, she was a meager 5’2”, but with her red heels that consisted mostly of a complicated net of straps, she was a much more respectable 5’8”. Save for equally red lipstick, her make-up was done in blues and silver, making her already bright blue eyes even brighter. Her hair was up on top of her head in a complicated weave of braids, except for two small, carefully curled sections framing her heart-shaped face. Her earrings weren’t real diamonds because the only real diamonds she could afford were approximately the size of a microbe, but they shined well enough and looked pretty all the same.
She eyed herself critically for a long moment before she finally nodded once in satisfaction. She grabbed her phone from where she had carelessly tossed it onto the bed and snapped a quick picture of her reflection before sending it to Sam. She had already sent Sam the man’s profile pictures from the dating site. Almost immediately, she got a cheerful, ‘Looking gr8! :)’ in reply.
With that lovely bit of validation, Charlie grabbed her small red clutch, shoved her phone and her wallet into it, and headed out the door to meet the car that would be arriving within the next few minutes, with any luck.
*
The car was fifteen minutes late, and Charlie was very glad she had called for it to arrive a half hour early. Nothing made a worse impression on a first date than showing up late. And even if she wasn’t expecting the guy to fall head over heels for her, she did at least want him to like her.
Especially given how much he would be spending on dinner that night. Just staring up at the sign on the front of the small building, tucked unobtrusively away between two larger buildings, she was already expecting dinner to cost a fortune.
She pulled her phone from her clutch and took a picture
of the sign, with its elegant letters spelling out The Hidden Garden and the swirling, floral metalwork surrounding it. She followed it with a picture of the nearest street sign and sent both of them to Sam. She got a thumbs-up emoji in reply only a moment later.
Content that Sam knew where she was for the evening, to a suitable degree, Charlie took a deep breath and stepped inside. She dithered in the small, cozy entryway for a moment before approaching the hostess. Clearing her throat, she asked, “Has anyone from the Croasdell party of two arrived yet?”
Chipper enough that Charlie couldn’t help but wonder what her boss was feeding her, the hostess reported, “Not yet! Your table is free, though, so would you rather wait here or at the table?”
Charlie glanced around slowly. Everyone in the restaurant was so much wealthier than her. She knew she looked just fine, but she couldn’t help but to think that if she was just sitting alone at a table, somehow everyone else would be able to tell just by looking at her that she didn’t belong.
Smiling politely, she backed towards a plush leather chair in the corner of the entryway. “I’ll just wait here,” she replied, lowering herself into the seat. “It will probably only be a few minutes, anyway.”
The hostess beamed pleasantly and nodded and left Charlie to her thoughts. Luckily, it really was only a few minutes before the door opened again and in walked the man whose profile she had accepted. She practically scrambled to her feet, smoothing her dress down needlessly as he looked at her.
“Ezekiel Croasdell?” she asked, though his features were rather striking and she doubted she was just going to coincidentally run into someone who looked just like him.
“Zeke,” he corrected plainly. “Charlemagne Harrison?” he asked in return.
“Charlie,” she corrected, in much the same tone.
Considering they weren’t exactly making those introductions in hushed tones, the hostess simply caught their attention and ushered them along, gesturing quickly for them to follow her. They trailed along after her, through the small dining room and out the back door, into the fenced-in yard. The ground was made of slate stones in mosaic patterns, the metal fence twined and twirled and swirled in floral patterns, and there were trellises leading up to wooden beams overhead, so flowering plants in blue, red, orange, yellow, pink, and purple crept across them, turning into a beautiful canopy.
A hidden garden indeed.
The small table they were led to and its two chairs were made of the same swirling metal as the fence, though the chairs were padded with black silk cushions. They took their seats, accepted their menus from the hostess, and took a moment to look around as the hostess breezed her way back inside. There were only four other people in the garden, sitting at two other tables. Neither of those tables was near theirs. It was quiet. Peaceful, even.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Charlie offered after a moment, toying idly with the edge of her napkin with two fingers.
“Likewise,” Zeke returned, nodding his head once. “You look lovely.”
“You, too,” Charlie mumbled, face heating slightly as soon as the words were out of her mouth. ‘Lovely.’ Who called a guy lovely? “I mean, very handsome.”
That, at least, was the truth. His features were sharp and angular, and his skin was lightly tanned. His eyes were a deep, calculating green, and his hair was black, slicked back, and just long enough that the longest ends came to nearly the base of his neck. He was broad and sturdy, but not to an absurd or comical degree, and he looked like he used his hands a lot, the tendons prominent in the backs of them. His red shirt, black jacket, and black trousers were all impeccably tailored.
Honestly, so far Charlie wasn’t seeing any downsides to a most likely strictly physical relationship, as long as he didn’t turn out to be an asshole. She would remain cautiously optimistic for the time being.
Conversation was largely harmless at first. Charlie explained that she was a waitress. Zeke worked in his family’s business, which seemed to have something to do with real estate. Neither of them had any particularly crazy hobbies that needed to be side-eyed. Both of them had lived in Crestholme for their whole lives, and they had even lived in similar areas a few times, though they had both gone to different enough schools not to know anyone in common. There was nothing enormously surprising, and that was a comfort.
When the most predictable question came, Charlie actually felt pretty comfortable answering it.
“What led you to try this?” Zeke wondered, gesturing around with one hand, though the motion seemed to encompass “this situation” rather than anything in the immediate setting.
“I was determined to be a fine arts major,” Charlie explained, shrugging one shoulder. “My dad was determined not to help me pay for it; said it would build character if I did it myself.”
“And now you’re in a lifetime’s worth of debt because of it,” Zeke guessed.
“Student loans,” Charlie confirmed. “Getting the degree was fun, but expensive, and as it turns out, when you’re a no name, no one’s really interested in buying what you paint.”
“You paint?” he wondered curiously, sounding intrigued.
“Less than I would like, but yeah.” She cocked her head to one side. “You do anything like that?”
With a slightly self-deprecating wryness, he returned, “I’ve never had much of a knack for the visual arts. I play piano, though.”
…Well. That was fairly attractive. But that was an observation that Charlie kept to herself for the time being. Serenading of any sort seemed like more of a second or third date sort of thing. Even so, she filed that detail away for later.
On the whole, things seemed to be going pretty well, and the food was amazing. Charlie had been holding onto some rather cautious pessimism ever since she agreed to the date, but everything seemed to be going well enough.
Once their desserts arrived, Zeke took a breath, and Charlie thought dryly, ‘Oh no.’
“I’m not going to beat around the bush,” he began. “I’m expected to marry—and soon—if I’m to remain my father’s primary inheritor. But the matter is not as simple as just finding the right amount of money to throw at someone.”
“What, do you need someone who can behave in polite society?” Charlie wondered dryly, leaning an elbow on the table and propping her chin up on it. “Someone the family will approve of?”
Zeke paused for a second before he acknowledged, “Well, that is a factor, but it’s a small one. Whoever I marry needs to be alright with the fact that my family consists entirely of were-bears.”
Charlie stared at him for a very long time. Nearly a full minute, in fact. She thought about asking him to repeat himself, but frankly, she was pretty sure she heard him just fine.
Were-bears.
“Were-bears,” she repeated slowly. “As in people who turn into bears. You—have got to be fucking with me,” she decided, forgetting her manners in light of the evening’s sudden absurdity.
Zeke only watched her placidly in return. He did not look like he was fucking with her, or at least not knowingly.
So, he was crazy, then.
Heedless of the slightly gob-smacked look on Charlie’s face, Zeke carried onward. “I need to show intent to mate and have children in the near future or my father will disinherit me. Whether or not I actually do have children is slightly irrelevant, I suppose, so long as he is assured that I’m going to.”
“Won’t he notice if there aren’t any babies?” Charlie asked faintly, and she wasn’t even sure why she was playing along. It made no sense.
“He’s a very old man,” Zeke answered simply.
“Oh.” As if any of the conversation actually made any amount of sense. “Sneaky.”
There was a huff that was maybe supposed to be a laugh, though he didn’t say anything immediately. He pulled his wallet out as the waitress approached again and simply handed her his card before she could even pull out the black folder. As she bustled away again, Zeke turned his attenti
on back to Charlie.
“I’m not expecting an immediate response,” he assured her, “but if you’re open to the idea, I would be interested in seeing you again.” He pulled a scrap of receipt paper out of his wallet, and as the waitress came back, he used the pen in the folder to scrawl his phone number on the back of the scrap of paper and handed it over. Charlie tucked it into her clutch.
Afterwards, he walked her to the door of the restaurant, and he looked slightly dubious as she assured him that she already had a ride home.
She watched him walk away, presumably towards his probably expensive car, before she called another car to pick her up.
*
Charlie dialed Sam’s number on her cell phone and brought it to her ear as she set about stripping down. She was already halfway out of her dress when Sam picked up, and she demanded instantly, “So, how did it go? Was he as hot as his pictures?”