The Grump I Married (Braeburn Cliffs #1)

Chapter 1

LENA

“Shite!”

If there was one thing I’d learned after seven years of working for Weston Kincaid, the Scottish former-tech-guru-turned-energy mogul, it was to steer clear of the man once he started adding bloody to his swear words.

Shite was fine. Calling someone a bawbag…

well, no one else in Texas actually knew what that meant, so it wasn’t a problem.

Saying a meeting was pure pish…people could make a good guess at that one, but no one seemed to mind because Weston never seemed all that upset when he said it. But once—

“Bloody fecking shite!”

Yep, once “bloody” started popping out, it was not the time to approach him with files that needed signatures, HR requests, or the reminder of my upcoming time off.

It was time to solve problems, redirect non-urgent business, and push unsuspecting citizens out of his warpath—skills I’d honed into a fine art form.

I signed off my email—Lena Harp, personal assistant—just as the door to the adjoining room flew open, and I glanced up from my desk. Weston stood in the doorway of his office, dark hair mussed by tense fingers, steel-cut jaw on edge, his nostrils flaring.

“I take it the meeting didn’t go well?” I said, preparing to take notes.

“I hate solicitors!” He stalked across the top floor of Kincaid Energy’s Houston office, retrieving a paper from the printer. “It’s a mess. It’s all a bloody fecking mess! Wasn’t Grandad having a will supposed to make my life easier?”

“That’s the general idea,” I said, watching his scowl darken.

“Well, it’s not!” he snapped.

“What did the lawyer say?” I asked patiently.

He wasn’t usually the kind of boss that shouted.

He preferred a good, intense glare when trying to break people.

But he’d been understandably out of sorts and on edge since losing Grandad Pete.

“Is your grandfather forcing you and Jasper to share Lochbrae?”

Weston hissed at the sound of his much-hated cousin’s name. “That would almost be easier. No, the estate’s mine—conditionally.”

“Well, what’s the condition?”

“I have to get married.”

Brooding Scottish billionaire say what? I blinked, my eyes flicking from those thick brows, coiled tight across his forehead, to the ticking muscle in his jaw, certain I’d misheard him. “Excuse me? You have to—”

“Get married,” he repeated. He strode toward my desk, paper in hand, like this was a perfectly normal Tuesday morning. He thrust the paper in my direction.

I was so caught off guard that I forgot my rule and inhaled, drawing in a deep whiff of that damn cologne that always muddled my head.

It was spicy and smoky and put all sorts of thoughts in my head.

Goddamnit. I pinched my arm to get my head back in the game and took hold of the paper, blinking down at what looked to be a copy of Peter Kincaid’s will.

The legalese was dense, but I’d gotten good at parsing through it after years of reading the contracts that came through Weston’s inbox.

I scanned the page, my eyes running over the words again and again.

It was all there in black and white. Provided that Weston Kincaid shall be lawfully married within 30 days of my death… Holy shit.

“Grandad gave me a month to sort it—”

“Less than that now. It’s thirty days from his death,” I pointed out. We both knew it had already been a couple days.

“Exactly!” he growled. “I forfeit the entire Scotland estate if I can’t produce a wife and hand over a marriage certificate to the solicitor’s office in Braeburn in that time. All of Lochbrae would go to Jasper.”

I rubbed the side of my head, already feeling a boatload of work coming my way.

Work I didn’t have time for! Ughhhh. I was trying to tie everything up in neat bows for Weston before my time off next week.

His grandfather passing had been a shock—one even I had felt, despite mostly knowing Pete Kincaid through phone calls—but we were handling it, and I’d already managed to line everything up for him to return to Scotland to attend the funeral.

But this! This wasn’t just some little problem. When exactly was I supposed to find him a wife? Okay, that sounded ludicrous despite the things I’d done for Weston over the years, but I wasn’t so naive as to think he’d handle this on his own.

“When you say—” My words were cut off by the sight of Weston rolling his shirt sleeves down, depriving me of the view of his toned forearms. Bad move on his part—you’d think someone with his genius-level IQ would have realized I had a much harder time standing strong against him when those forearms were in view.

But if he wanted to make it easier for me to keep a clear head, that was fine by me.

Maybe he thought he looked more authoritative and in charge with his cuffs buttoned and his jacket on—and if he thought that, he wasn’t exactly wrong.

But as he slipped on the suit jacket—black, as all of his suits had been since he’d gotten the news of his grandfather’s death—he looked like the untouchable billionaire he was.

My weakness was for the man underneath the bespoke, the one few people got to see.

But there was no need for him to know that.

He straightened to his full six-foot-two, pinning me in place with those sharp, penetrating eyes.

“We’ll have to get married,” he said.

My thoughts short circuited. What the hell was he talking about?

I wasn’t marrying the man!

“Weston—”

“Yes,” he barked. “You and me. Married. Today.”

He set off, pacing back and forth in front of my desk—one of his stress reactions—as a humorless laugh escaped my lips. “Okay, Mr. CEO of Insane Ideas, I know you didn’t just phrase that like an order.”

“It all needs to be in order before the funeral,” he continued. “I don’t have time to be chasing down marriage certificates in Scotland, so we need to move quickly.”

I stared at Weston like he’d sprouted three heads. There was no we in this equation.

“How soon will the helicopter be here?” he asked, checking his watch.

“Thirty minutes,” I answered.

“Right then, can you get a hold of city hall and see what hoops we need to jump through to make the wedding happen today?” He set off for his office.

I jumped to my feet, chasing him into the glass-walled corner space that looked over downtown Houston.

This was his problem: he walked too fast, talked too fast, made decisions too damn fast—without bothering to actually talk to the people who were affected by them.

“Hang on a second,” I said, stumbling as Milo, his adorably mischievous golden retriever, nudged me in the knees.

Weston brought Milo into the office today so they could leave directly for the airport.

I patted Milo’s head and nudged him away. “We need to discuss this.”

“Discuss what?” Weston asked, standing behind his desk, eyes glued to his phone.

Seriously? The man expected me to marry him—with zero warning—and he didn’t think that merited a little discussion? Or maybe, I don’t know, starting with an actual proposal instead of skipping past all that and taking my consent for granted?

I resisted the urge to groan out loud and released a steadying breath, as I so often did when dealing with Weston’s more ridiculous demands.

Because I needed the paycheck if I ever had a hope in hell of being able to afford grad school one day.

For that, I was prepared to do a lot. But there was nothing in my contract about marrying my boss, and I planned to keep it that way.

“Milo!” Weston snapped as the dog started gnawing on a stack of files I’d left on his desk for him to sign. “Get off of that, you wee menace!”

Milo darted back to my side for head rubs.

My phone pinged suddenly with a new task: Wedding Prep. A spark of irritation crawled up the back of my neck as I glared at Weston. “You can’t be serious right now.”

“I need this done today, and you’re the logical choice,” he insisted, scrolling through his phone like he was ordering lunch instead of upending my entire life.

“Six months, max. Once the estate clears probate, we’ll file for divorce.

” He held up his phone. “The website says something about needing a waiver if we want this to happen today,” he said.

“Can you sort that? License this morning, ceremony this afternoon.”

I rolled my eyes, staring down at Milo, wondering at what point today we’d stepped into the twilight zone. “Sure, let me just update my email signature to temporary wife,” I snarked. “Do you want that above or below personal assistant?”

Weston frowned at my expression. “This isn’t a joke.”

“Good, I’m glad we’re in agreement on that,” I bit out, still trying to process the fact that my boss, the same man who made me pick up his dry cleaning, had just added nuptials to my list of daily tasks, as if it mattered just as little as that.

Okay, so maybe he didn’t know the idea of marriage was a sensitive subject with me, but that was still no excuse to be so damn cavalier about the whole thing.

“Do you even realize what you’re saying?” I had to fight the urge to grab him and shake some sense into his ridiculously handsome head. “This is like actual marriage. A legally binding agreement with—”

“Temporary marriage,” he corrected, as if that somehow made it all okay. He grabbed some of the files on his desk and started stuffing them into his briefcase. “We’ll say it falls under the additional tasks and responsibilities part of the contract.”

I wanted to lean over his desk and whack him with those files. “Um, no, that’s for things like picking up Milo’s dog food.”

He waved me off, back to scrolling his phone. “I’ll obviously compensate you for the inconvenience. We can discuss terms—”

I dropped my hands to my hips. “I don’t need to discuss the terms, Weston. My answer is no.”

He huffed, still barely bothering to look my way. “Why are you being so difficult?”