Chapter One
Ashon
Bel Air, Los Angeles
If I wanted to watch someone lie to my face, I’d go back to the studio and let one of my Oscar-winning actresses give it a try. They wouldn’t succeed entirely, of course, but at least they’d have the decency to fake some chemistry considering the millions I throw at them.
And hell, I might be marginally entertained while I had my time wasted.
The woman seated across from me is already sweating through her silk blouse despite the air-conditioning, blinking as if I’m holding a loaded gun instead of offering a diamond ring the size of a pigeon’s egg.
‘So,’ I say slowly, ‘you’d be my fiancée.
For six months, possibly a year. We attend a few galas in Accra and around the world, stay under the same roof at my grandfather’s estate, pretend to be hopelessly in love.
And in return, you get half a million dollars and a very shiny piece of jewellery.
All subject to complete discretion via an NDA.
Are you on board with that?’ Even saying the words that remind me I’m reduced to scheming demeans me but, alas, here we are.
Rather, here I am. Forced to indulge in this… farce.
She gulps. ‘You mean, you actually want people to believe this is real? It’s not like…a script or something?’
Lord save me.
‘Thank you for coming,’ I say, standing. ‘Have my assistant call for a car to take you…wherever you need to go.’
I don’t wait for her to scurry out. Or worse, plead her hopeless case, the way I can see she’s gearing up to do.
I rise and stalk to the wall of glass that frames the LA skyline, watching the lights of Sunset shimmer below me.
I would punch a wall if I had any hope that the building bitterness and simmering fury would recede.
That the glaring waste of my precious time in any way made the end-justifying-the-means feel any better.
It doesn’t.
Fake love. Pretend devotion. Just enough performance to satisfy my grandfather’s demands and unlock a legacy that should already be mine with no strings attached.
One that should’ve been signed over to me on my thirtieth birthday if the old man wasn’t, all these decades later, mired in the same mind games he seemed to think he excelled at.
I’d planned on never going back to Ghana any time soon—at least while he was alive—not even to reclaim my birthright.
Until the opportunity to make a long-denied dream a reality became a siren call I couldn’t resist. Even then, I’d set my sights elsewhere, far away from prying family eyes and unwanted interference.
But then Nana Biney the Third, my esteemed grandfather and a man who despised being ignored, rose as if he were a spectre I couldn’t ignore.
He called not to check in on his eldest grandson, or heaven forbid, to come within a blink of confessing that he’d missed me.
No, that would be the epitome of weakness.
The Bineys were very many things, but never, ever weak.
No, he’d called to deliver his late ultimatum in that clipped, royal tone that still managed to gut me as if I were a boy who’d disappointed him—again.
‘Until you prove you’re committed to legacy and family,’ he’d said, ‘you will not inherit the township. It will go to Theo.’
Theo.
My cousin. The poisoned clincher to end all clinchers and the one pressure point guaranteed to sting. The one thing my grandfather had known would light a fire where all else had failed.
That smug bastard could barely locate his morals, let alone manage the infrastructure of a developing film hub.
We’d grown up shoulder-to-shoulder—two alphas forever jostling for the same spotlight—but our visions had diverged as if split railway lines.
Theodore Biney, all Savile Row polish and architectural swagger, who’d once turned a boutique hotel in Lisbon into a gaudy money pit just to impress a super-model investor.
He loves projects that make headlines as much as he loves the blueprints themselves.
He can sketch a gravity-defying hotel at breakfast and negotiate its funding by lunch.
What he can’t resist is turning every triumph into a monument to Theodore.
Hand him Obibini’s land and I know he’ll chase dazzling towers first, community storytelling second.
The prospect of surrendering my father’s dream to a cousin who’d rather win the world’s gaze than nurture its voices knots my stomach.
Which is exactly why I’m standing here, plotting the perfect fiancée, the perfect performance.
A future Nana can’t veto, because I’ll bend every Hollywood contact before I let Theodore Biney’s ego become the face of Africa’s first world-class studio.
The enclave—Nkyinkyim—was everything I’d been building towards. A chance to bring African storytelling to life. A pipe dream realised against all odds and creating real, much-needed jobs. Opportunity. Pride. A long-denied voice on the global stage.
Hunting for a real fiancée—the tabloids would feast—had been a non-starter, of course. Not after my last attempt at a relationship had hit the skids faster than a stunt car on a rain-soaked backlot.
Delphine had shown me very quickly how false affection turns to dollar signs. The moment our involvement hit Page Six, her lawyers hit me with a revised NDA and a clause for ‘image-maintenance payments’.
She’d loved my studio clout and billions a whole lot more than my admittedly tough to crack heart, and when I pulled the plug on our liaison she’d barely waited till sunset before she’d sold the break-up story for six figures.
Intimacy, legacy and fortune mix as if oil and acid. I’m not offering a real-life liaison—and access to half my net worth—to another heartless opportunist. That lesson has been well-learned.
A fake fiancée I can control, along with a scripted romance I can exit. That is what will aid in achieving my ultimate goal.
Messy and patently false feelings won’t blindside me if I know from day one they’re not part of the contract.
My grandfather, with one phone call filled with oiled threats and blatant manipulation, had boiled down years of hard work, pride swallowing, strategy and counter-strategy to whether I was in love. Or worse, whether I intended to procreate.
And based on the answer I’d needed to provide during that dreadful conversation, everything I’d worked for would all go to hell unless I produced a woman. A partner. A showpiece of tradition and affection. Someone Nana Biney would deem ‘suitable’.
So here I am, reduced to scrambling for talent to stage the most important role in my life.
Fake it until I make it.
Whirling from the window, I drop behind my desk, lean back in the leather chair, fingers steepled, gaze fixed on the next hopeful young actress sat across from me.
She’s all gloss and curated charm, every movement precise—her smile, her beautiful dark chocolate skin, her laughter, even the way she crosses her legs as if in First Lady poise.
And yet…she’s not real enough to fool a Biney, never mind Nana Biney himself.
No, most definitely not him. The man who spent decades standing at the shoulders of presidents and prime ministers, whispering pearls of wisdom none dared ignore.
He’d earned himself royalty status from that. A status he’d passed down, with very many strings attached, to his progeny. Strings he wielded like the master puppeteer he is.
‘I can be whatever you need me to be,’ the actress purrs, voice syrupy with promise. Sweet to the point of sickly. ‘A wife. A girlfriend. A mistress. A who—’
I lift my hand and offer a tight smile to stop this debacle before it goes any further.
She would be lucky to utter a single word in my grandfather’s presence before he had her thrown out.
Like they always do, she gears up to plead her case.
I glance at my assistant, Renée, who springs into action from the corner of the room.
‘Thank you. We’ll be in touch,’ Renée says briskly.
The actress leaves, hips swaying as if she’s still auditioning.
The moment the door shuts, I scrub a hand down my face. ‘This is a waste of time.’
‘Well,’ Renée says without looking up from her iPad, ‘your impatience aside, it’s still the perfect solution to your problems. You want your inheritance and your production house.
Your grandfather wants to see you settled.
In love. Or at the very least committed-adjacent. A small price to pay if you ask me.’
I swallow the growl building in my throat, the utter loathing of the trap closing in on me. ‘I’d rather jump off a bridge.’
Renée arches a brow. ‘There’s always option B. Forget the studio deal and let Nana B gloat from his ancestral throne while he parcels your birthright to this cousin to build his questionable monument.’
I glare at her poorly disguised reverse psychology.
She’s not wrong. That’s the worst part. My grandfather would carry through with his threat without a second thought.
Many had called his bluff in the past and lived to regret it.
And it stuck deep in my craw that he’d found the perfect counter to my next move—to block my every contingency, at least on the African continent for as long as he lived.
I already tried to circumvent him once and been summoned to see Nana’s lawyers who’d made it clear.
The Biney Trust would tangle me up in court for years before he released the land or the substantial thirty-year endowment funding that came with it—the funds I needed for my legacy project, Obibini Studios.
I’d been firmly told that unless I publicly ‘demonstrated stability and commitment worthy of the family name’ any attempts to fund a similar project elsewhere would not succeed.
Their words. Not mine. As if I needed a surround sound echo of my grandfather’s words. As if their collective voices didn’t boil down to ‘find a woman’. Fast.
That’s your best and only short-term option.
The underlying message beneath the insult is even louder.
Because as important as you think you are, you’ll never be enough on your own.
And that?