My Billionaire Father Ordered Me To Marry An Heiress — I Chose The Single Mom Next Door Instead
Part 1
My father had a way of making a direct order sound like a mild weather report.
He slid the cream folder across his mahogany desk with two fingers.
You will marry Megan Ashford before the summer gala closes out the season.
I stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows of his study twenty stories above the harbor.
I was the heir to forty years of steel and shipping fortune.
And I was being instructed to choose a bride from a glossy portfolio.
I did not open the folder.
If I refused, the board would vote against me in October.
The lake house would be sold to people who would bulldoze the rose garden my mother had planted before she died.
Love is a luxury good that depreciates the moment you drive it off the lot.
He instructed me to spend the summer at the lake house and get photographed with Megan by August.
I picked up the folder because picking it up cost nothing yet.
The drive north took three hours as the city thinned into pine and granite.
Our estate was a massive cedar-shingled mansion built for parties I could not remember enjoying.
Appearing from the kitchen with a dish towel over one shoulder, Brenda warned me the lakeside room would smell like last summer and that the new neighbors had a loud child.
Ignoring the stifling air, I carried my bag upstairs and pushed the windows open to the heavy heat.
A bicycle bell rang twice from somewhere below.
A child laughed with the kind of real joy that falls apart at the edges.
I met Heather Quinn the very next morning when she was halfway up my oldest oak tree.
I found a woman in cut-off shorts balancing on a thick branch.
She was reaching for a purple kite snarled in the canopy.
She told me not to say anything because she was fully aware of how the situation looked.
A little girl in rain boots stood at the base of the trunk.
The child had a gap where a front tooth had been and a smear of strawberry jam on her mouth.
Lily asked if I was the grumpy summer prince Brenda had warned them about.
Heather descended in a controlled fall of bark and suppressed cursing.
Her eyes took a quick inventory of my expensive running clothes and my closed-off jaw.
She visibly decided she was not going to be impressed by my fortune.
She hoisted Lily onto her hip with unconscious strength and promised to keep to their side of the pathetic boxwood hedge.
The trouble truly started three days later with a flooded vegetable garden.
Heather pounded on my porch door wearing rubber gloves and holding a corroded pipe like an enemy’s head.
Our automatic irrigation system had burst under the boxwoods and was drowning her tomatoes.
Instead of calling a maintenance crew I pulled on gardening boots and followed her to the muddy plot.
Lily sat on an overturned bucket narrating the survival chances of a listing tomato plant.
I crouched in the green-smelling heat and worked the broken section free.
We passed tools back and forth in a surprisingly comfortable silence.
She admitted she fixed things herself because landlords used flooded basements to steal security deposits.
For one unguarded second the defensive walls fell away from both of us.
I went home with dirty hands and the strange sensation of having been genuinely useful.
The catering vans turned up the gravel driveway on the second Saturday of summer.
My father had driven up unannounced with Megan Ashford and her parents.
He had also brought a professional photographer to document the lakeside estate.
By six the porch was strung with bistro lights and the air smelled of expensive gardenia perfume.
I stood at the center of a perfectly arranged tableau.
Arthur murmured for me to smile while resting a heavy warning hand on my shoulder.
Megan stood at my elbow looking lovely and entirely bored.
She found the story of me fixing a pipe rustic and charming for the cameras.
That was the exact moment the bright bicycle bell rang across the grass.
Lily came pedaling up the path with her rain boots flashing in the twilight.
Heather jogged closely behind her in the same knotted flannel shirt.
Both of them stopped dead at the edge of the catered lawn where our photographed world began.
Heather apologized breathlessly while taking in the lights and the lens and the heiress at my side.
Megan loudly asked if the woman in the flannel was part of the hired help.
The photographer turned his expensive camera toward the muddy intruders.
Arthur’s smile thinned into a dangerous blade.
Something inside my chest simply stopped obeying orders.
I stepped out from under my father’s heavy hand and walked off the porch onto the cool grass.
I walked straight toward the woman frozen at the boxwood line.
I made very sure my father could hear every single word I said.
I announced to the silent crowd that Heather was the woman I was going to marry.
The bistro lights buzzed loudly in the sudden vacuum.
The photographer lowered his camera with his mouth hanging slightly open.
Heather did not swoon or look relieved.
She let out a harsh laugh that sounded like someone being handed a live wire.
She gripped her daughter’s handlebars and told me absolutely not.
She turned the bike around and marched back into the dark without a single backward glance.
The flatness in her voice was vastly worse than shouting.
My father stepped out of the shadows, his voice terrifyingly mild as he promised to destroy the one woman I actually wanted.
