Sneak Peek
Fake Married to My Billionaire Enemy
Chapter one – Dakota
"You folding?"
It's the way he says it that gets my blood boiling.
We're standing in a Vegas wedding chapel with a marriage license between us and champagne still buzzing through my bloodstream.
I should walk away.
But I don't.
Instead, I take the pen.
***
Two hours earlier…
“So just to be clear,” I say into the microphone, “we’re knocking down a whole neighborhood and calling it an upgrade?”
Callum Collier doesn’t flinch.
“No,” he says. “We’re fixing a problem.” His gaze settles on me. Steady. “You’re focusing on the part that makes a better soundbite.”
“With respect, Mr. Collier, people tend to focus on the part where they lose their homes.” I lean into the microphone a little more.
“You just described displacing four hundred families as a net positive for the neighborhood’s economic profile.
I’m curious what metric you used to measure the four hundred families. ”
The audience shifts. Someone in the third row actually laughs, then catches themselves.
Callum Collier doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t adjust in his seat or reach for his water. He just turns his head and looks at me with those gray eyes like I’ve said something mildly interesting at a dinner party.
“The metric,” he says, “is whether the neighborhood exists in ten years or gets swallowed by blight and deferred maintenance. Displacement is a consequence, not a goal. There’s a difference.”
“Not to the four hundred families.”
“No,” he agrees. “Not to them.”
He says it without apology, without softening, which is somehow worse than if he’d been defensive about it.
I came into this panel expecting Alexander Chambers, who I’ve debated twice and can read like a grant application.
Instead I got this. Six foot three of composed, dark-haired certainty sitting two seats to my left like he was born at a panel table and has been patiently waiting for someone worth talking to.
I hate that he might have found one.
“The Humphrey project in South Brooklyn,” I say. “Out of two hundred and sixty units there are just twelve designated affordable. You want to tell me that’s a neighborhood investment?”
“I want to tell you it’s twelve units that didn’t exist before.” He pauses. “I’d also want to tell you that the tax revenue from that building funds the school three blocks away, but I understand that’s a less satisfying answer.”
“It’s a deflection dressed up as math.”
“It’s math dressed up as a deflection,” he says. “There’s a difference there, too.”
Someone in the audience starts clapping before they realize this isn’t that kind of panel. The moderator makes a vague gesture toward wrapping up. I ignore it. Callum Collier doesn’t even glance at the moderator. We’ve both stopped performing for the room. I’m not sure when that happened.
“I think,” I say, “that men who build luxury developments and call it urban renewal are very good at finding the framing that lets them sleep at night.”
“And I think,” he says, “that people who run nonprofits on three grants and goodwill are very good at finding the framing that lets them feel righteous while nothing actually changes.”
My mouth opens. Closes.
The moderator calls time.
***
The open bar is doing real business by the time I get there, and I’ve almost convinced myself to find Kaiya and debrief in peace when I turn around and he’s there. Right there. Holding a glass of champagne and looking at me.
I don’t leave.
“You were wrong about the Brooklyn school,” I say, by way of a hello.
“I was right about the Brooklyn school.” He hands me a glass. I take it because I’m not going to make a whole thing about accepting champagne from someone I’m in the middle of an argument with. “The tax revenue figure is public record.”
“The school’s been underfunded for eleven years. One building doesn’t fix eleven years.”
“No. But it’s a start.”
“You don’t get credit for a start when you’re the reason it needed one.”
He looks at me over the rim of his glass. “Is that what I am? The reason?”
“You, and every developer who treated that neighborhood like a spreadsheet for the last two decades.”
“You’re including me in a category that predates my involvement by fifteen years.”
“You bought into the model. You profit from the model. You’re in the category.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone who’s run out of things to say.
The quiet of someone deciding which thing to say next.
He’s only thirty-four years old and already does that like a man twice his age, which is either impressive or depressing.
Right now, I’m going with depressing because it makes me feel better.
“You’re very certain,” he says finally.
“About this? Yes.”
“About everything, from what I’ve seen.”
“Is that a criticism?”
“It’s an observation.” He tilts his head slightly. “You walked into that panel knowing exactly what you were going to say, exactly what I was going to say, and exactly how you were going to respond to it. You had the whole thing mapped.”
“That’s called being prepared.”
“I do that too,” he says. “But you’d probably call it a flaw.”
I open my mouth and close it again. That’s twice in one evening. I don’t love that.
“That’s different,” I say.
“How?”
“Because I do it in service of something that matters.”
“And I don’t?”
“Your profit margins aren’t a cause, Mr. Collier.”
“Callum.” He says without heat. “And no, they’re not. But they fund the thing that funds the thing that funds the school. You want purity, go work for a charity. You want change, you need someone willing to move money.”
“I want accountability.”
“I know.” He looks at me steadily. “That’s why you’re still here.”
The champagne is good. I hate that it’s good.
I hate that he’s standing close enough that I can see how dark his hair is under the bar lighting, no artifice to it, just a man who looks exactly like what he is.
I hate that the argument hasn’t gotten boring.
Most arguments get boring, but this one keeps sharpening.
“You know what your problem is?” I challenge.
“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“You’ve never done anything impulsive in your life. Every decision you’ve ever made was planned three moves out. You probably even scheduled this conversation.”
“I didn’t schedule this conversation.”
“But you’re running it.”
He sets his glass down, then picks it back up, and looks at me in a way that feels like he’s actually seeing me, which is different from being looked at. I know the difference. “You think I can’t be spontaneous?”
“I think spontaneous isn’t in your vocabulary.”
“That sounds like a dare,” he says.
“It’s an observation.”
“It’s a dare,” he says again, and this time his mouth pulls at the corner like he’s decided this is funny and is trying not to show it. He sets down his glass and holds out his hand. “Come with me.”
I look at his hand. “What? Where?”
“Does it matter?”
“Obviously.”
“Two blocks,” he says. “That’s all I’ll tell you.”
The champagne is doing its work, warm and effervescent in my chest. I’ve spent the last two hours being told in various polite and impolite ways that I’m idealistic, impractical, and tilting at windmills.
Callum Collier, who is thirty-four years old and represents everything I’ve spent my entire professional life arguing against, is standing here with his hand out looking at me like he’s the one taking the risk.
I take his hand.
He walks and I follow. Two blocks in Vegas at ten at night means neon, heat, and the smell of the strip.
I keep watching him from the side, waiting for the moment he steers us toward a bar or a restaurant, somewhere reasonable.
He doesn’t. Instead, he stops in front of a chapel with a lit-up sign and a bored-looking attendant visible through the glass door.
I laugh, the sound coming out short and sharp.
“You’re not serious.”
“You said I’m never spontaneous.”
“This isn’t spontaneous, this is insane.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” He looks at me. His hand is still holding mine and neither of us has moved to fix that. “You folding?”
There it is. The word lands exactly where he meant it to.
I should fold. I know I should. Any reasonable person would fold and I am, on most days, a reasonable person.
“You can’t just walk into a chapel.”
He pulls out his phone, looks something up, puts it away. “Clark County Marriage License Bureau. Open twenty-four hours.” He looks at me. “You folding?”
“Stop asking me that.”
“I’m just wanting to be sure.”
I hate him a little, but find myself also getting in the cab that he’s now hailed.
The license bureau is three minutes away and aggressively fluorescent, the lighting of a place that has no interest in romance and never did.
There’s a short line. We stand in it. This is the moment, I think.
This is when one of us looks at the overhead lights, the laminate countertop, the sign that says BOTH PARTIES MUST PRESENT VALID ID, and decides that this has gone far enough.
Callum takes out his wallet and I take out mine.
We show our IDs to a clerk who doesn’t comment on the champagne smell, my half-escaped hair, or the fact that neither of us is looking at the other. She types something, takes the fee, and slides the license across the counter.
Callum picks it up and looks at it. Seemingly satisfied, he holds the door open for me on the way out.
We get back in the cab.
The chapel attendant looks up when we push through the door.
He’s got the face of a man who clocked out emotionally around his hundredth chapel wedding and hasn’t clocked back in since.
There’s a laminated menu of packages on the counter.
Callum looks at it for approximately three seconds, points to one, and slides his credit card across without checking the price.
I watch him do it. The champagne hums through me, warmer now than it was.
My heart is doing something loud and stupid.
I keep waiting, genuinely waiting, for the moment one of us comes to their senses.
He’s eight years older than me and looks it in the best possible way, jaw tight, dark eyes unreadable, that specific calm that isn’t distance but containment.
Like there’s a lot going on underneath and he decided, a long time ago, that none of it goes on his face.
He picks up the pen. Signs his name, clean and fast, then holds it out to me.
I look at him. He looks back, his right brow raising ever so slightly, daring me to fold. The rest of his face gives nothing away except that he’s not going to be the one to stop.
I take the pen.
My handwriting is slightly unsteady when I sign, but I sign. Dakota Burris, right below Callum Collier, on a marriage license in a Las Vegas chapel at ten forty-three on a Thursday night.
“This is insane,” I say, quietly, more to myself than to him.
“Completely,” he agrees. He doesn’t look concerned about it.
“We’ll annul it tomorrow.”
“First thing,” he agrees. “I can be spontaneous and practical.”
The attendant clears his throat. We turn. He’s holding a laminated card in front of him like he’s done this ten thousand times, which he probably has.
“Do you Kevin, take Diana to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
“Callum,” Callum corrects.
The attendant doesn’t blink. “Do you, Callum, take Diana to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
“Dakota,” I say, still waiting for Callum to back out.
He looks at us both over the card. “Do you, Callum, take Dakota to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
“I do,” Callum says.
“And do you, Dakota, take Callum to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
I look at the card, then at Callum, who raises his brow again.
“I do.”
The attendant stamps something and hands us each a copy with the enthusiasm of someone stapling a receipt.
Callum looks down at his copy, then at me.
“Well,” he says. “That was spontaneous.”
Neither of us moves.
“Your turn for a dare,” he says.
I raise my brow, a small smile on my face. “Bring it on, Collier.”
“One drink,” he says. “My suite.”
“You have a suite?”
“I have a suite.”
I look at the license in my hand one more time, then back at him. “Lead the way.”