Marrying My Billionaire Best Friend For The Inheritance

Chapter 1 The Reading of the Charter

Weston Calloway had been in this conference room more times than he could count, and it had never once made him nervous, not when he was twenty-two and being introduced to the board as the next in line, not when he was twenty-eight and closing the largest private trust the bank had taken on in a decade, not even six months ago when his grandfather's casket had been lowered into the ground two miles from where he now sat.

Nervous was not a thing Weston allowed himself, not in this building, not in front of these people, and certainly not in front of Harold Ferris, the bank's eighty-one-year-old general counsel, who was currently sliding a leather folio across the mahogany table with the particular slowness of a man who knew exactly how much damage the paper inside it was about to do.

The room smelled like it always did, old wood polish and older money, the harbor visible through the tall windows behind Harold's chair, gray and restless under a sky that couldn't decide if it wanted to rain.

Weston had grown up watching that same water from that same window, sitting in his grandfather's lap at six years old while men in dark suits talked about numbers he didn't understand, and it had taken him until his twenties to understand that the view had been curated on purpose, a reminder every time you sat in this room that the harbor was where the family's money had first come from, two centuries ago, and the harbor was still watching.

"You've read the succession clause," Harold said. It wasn't a question. Harold Ferris did not ask questions he already knew the answer to, a professional habit Weston had always respected until this exact moment.

"I've read the succession clause you sent me a summary of," Weston said. "I haven't read the original document. Nobody has read the original document in what, thirty years?"

"Longer," Harold said. "Which is precisely the problem.

Your grandfather knew about this provision.

He told me himself, eleven years ago, that it existed and that it would likely never come into play, because he assumed, as we all did, that you would be married well before the question became relevant.

" Harold opened the folio and turned it so the yellowed page faced Weston directly, the handwriting on it faded to a brown so dark it was nearly black, the ink of a man two hundred and thirty-five years dead.

"I am sorry to be the one to tell you that assumption has now expired along with him. "

Weston looked at the page without touching it.

He had seen the bank's founding charter before, in the glass case in the lobby where tourists occasionally stopped to photograph the elaborate signature at the bottom, Josiah Calloway's name in a hand so ornate it looked more like a seal than a signature.

He had never read past the first paragraph, the one everyone quoted at shareholder dinners, the one about stewardship and permanence and the responsibility owed to families who trusted their fortunes to men who would still be standing when the fortunes' owners were not.

He had never read the clause Harold's finger was now resting on, halfway down the second page, in the same brown ink, unremarkable in appearance and catastrophic in consequence.

"Read it to me," Weston said. "I want to hear you say it out loud before I look at it myself."

Harold did not need his glasses for this.

He had clearly memorized it. "The chairmanship of this trust, and the full voting authority attached to it, shall pass only to a Calloway heir who has, by the completion of his thirty-fifth year, established a household of his own through marriage, it being the founder's conviction that a man who has not yet built a family of his own cannot be trusted with the stewardship of another family's future.

Should the heir apparent fail to meet this condition by the stated age, the chairmanship shall pass to the next eligible heir who has.

" Harold closed the folio gently, as if closing it any harder might somehow make the words disappear.

"Your cousin Griffin turned thirty-one in March.

He is not currently married either, but he has eleven days on you, which under the founder's original language is treated as a full generational gap for the purposes of eligibility, since Josiah Calloway wrote the clause assuming heirs would marry in their twenties, not spend their thirties building the largest private trust on the Eastern seaboard instead. "

Weston sat very still. He had built his entire adult life around the assumption that competence would be enough, that if he simply worked harder than anyone else in this building, if he understood every account, every client relationship, every quiet current of power that moved through this institution better than his cousin ever would, the chairmanship would be his because it should be his.

Nobody had told him a marriage certificate would outweigh two decades of proving himself.

Nobody had told him because nobody had believed, until his grandfather's heart gave out on a Tuesday morning in his study with a cup of coffee going cold beside him, that the clause would ever need to be invoked at all.

"Eleven days," Weston repeated.

"Eleven days until your thirty-fifth birthday," Harold said.

"After which, should you remain unmarried, the board is legally bound to recognize Griffin as chairman-elect, effective immediately, per the original charter, which this firm has now had independently verified by outside counsel to confirm it is, unfortunately, exactly as binding as it appears.

" Harold folded his hands on the table. He had known Weston since Weston was in diapers, had been at every holiday dinner at Calloway House for forty years, and there was something in his face now that looked almost like grief, the specific grief of a man who has spent his career protecting an institution and has just watched a two-hundred-year-old sentence make a fool of everyone who trusted it not to matter.

"I want to be clear that I do not believe Griffin orchestrated the timing of your grandfather's death.

I do believe he has known about this clause for at least as long as I have, and I believe the moment your grandfather's obituary ran, Griffin's attorneys began preparing exactly this conversation, on the assumption you would have no reasonable way to satisfy the condition in time. "

"He's wrong," Weston said, before he had fully decided to say it.

Harold's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Is he."

"I'm going to satisfy the condition."

"Weston." Harold's voice softened into something closer to the tone he'd used decades ago, correcting a teenage boy's Latin homework at the kitchen table in Calloway House while Weston's grandfather pretended not to be listening from the next room.

"You are not seeing anyone. I would know.

Your grandfather would have known. You have not been seriously involved with a woman in three years, since Camille, and that ended, if I recall the version you told your grandfather, because you found her more interested in the family than in you.

I am not telling you this to be cruel. I am telling you this because I need you to understand there is no version of the next eleven days that involves you falling in love with someone quickly enough to make this legally sound, and I need you to start thinking, right now, about what you are actually willing to do. "

Weston looked past Harold, out the tall windows, at the harbor doing exactly what it had always done, indifferent to whether a Calloway held the chairmanship or lost it to a cousin who had spent the last three years quietly telling every major client that the bank needed "a more contemporary face" without ever quite saying his own name out loud when he said it.

He thought about the clients his grandfather had trusted him with personally in the final year, the Ashworth trust, the Pemberton estate, families who had banked with Calloway & Ferris since before the Second World War and who would, if Griffin took over, find their money managed by a man who saw them as line items rather than people his family had known for generations.

He thought about the promise he'd made at his grandfather's grave, not out loud, not to anyone but himself, that he would not be the generation that let it slip.

And then, unbidden, in the specific way she always arrived in his thoughts when he was under enough pressure that his usual discipline slipped, he thought about Addie.

He didn't let himself sit with the thought the way it wanted him to.

He turned it over exactly once, quickly, the way you'd touch something hot to confirm it was still hot, and then he set it down, because the version of this plan that involved Adaline Hargrove was not a plan he was prepared to say out loud in front of Harold Ferris, not yet, not until he'd worked out in his own head whether he was about to save the bank or destroy the only relationship in his life that had never once been about money.

"There's a way to satisfy the condition," Weston said finally. "Marriage. The charter doesn't specify a length of courtship. It doesn't specify anything except that I be married by my thirty-fifth birthday. It doesn't require love. It requires a marriage certificate and a household."

Harold went very still. "You're talking about a marriage of convenience."

"I'm talking about a legal marriage that satisfies a legal condition."

"To whom?"

Weston didn't answer right away. Outside, a container ship was moving slowly across the gray water toward the harbor mouth, the same route ships had taken into this city for three hundred years, carrying whatever the world had to trade, and Weston found himself thinking, absurdly, that his family's fortune had started on exactly that kind of ship, a bet made on the strength of somebody's word rather than any legal document at all.

"I need you to draft something," he said. "Fast. Ironclad. The kind of prenuptial agreement that would survive a hostile audit from Griffin's attorneys, because that is exactly what it's going to face. And I need you to not ask me who it's for until I've had the conversation myself."

Harold studied him for a long moment, the kind of look that had once made Weston, at seventeen, confess to a car accident he'd been trying to hide from his grandfather for three days.

"Weston. If you are about to do what I think you are about to do, I need you to understand that this will not look like a marriage to anyone watching.

It will look exactly like what it is. Griffin's attorneys will investigate every text message, every joint account, every night either of you spends anywhere other than the same bed.

If there is a single inconsistency, a single moment where the two of you look like business partners instead of a married couple, they will use it, and they will use it publicly, in a way that will not just cost you the chairmanship.

It will humiliate whoever you've asked to do this with you. "

"I know," Weston said.

"Do you," Harold said. "Because from where I'm sitting, you look like a man who has already decided who he's asking, and you look considerably less troubled by the idea than you should."

Weston didn't answer that either. He stood, buttoned his jacket, and looked out at the harbor one more time before he left the room, because there was a version of the next eleven days that terrified him more than losing the chairmanship, and it had nothing to do with Griffin Calloway and everything to do with the fact that he had spent thirteen years being careful never to let Addie Hargrove know exactly how much of his life had been quietly built around the fact that she was in it.

He drove to the harbor district himself instead of calling his driver, because he needed the twenty minutes to think, and because some part of him, the part that had never entirely grown out of being a boy who rode his bike three miles to her father's workshop every day after school, wanted to arrive at her door the way he always had, without an entourage, without an appointment, just Weston, showing up because he needed her, the way he had a hundred times before this and never once for a reason this large.

The city outside the car window was the version of Amberhurst most people didn't see in the tourist photographs, the working harbor rather than the postcard one, warehouses converted into offices for shipping firms and insurance underwriters, cobblestones that had been laid down before the country existed jostling modern delivery trucks that had no business on streets built for horses.

Weston had loved this part of the city his whole life, had always found something honest about it that the manicured historic district near Calloway House lacked, and it was not lost on him that Addie's father had spent his entire career restoring exactly this kind of building, keeping the bones of the old city alive while everything around it modernized, and that the same instinct that made her father good at his work was the instinct Addie had inherited whole, the belief that some things were worth preserving even when preserving them cost more than tearing them down and starting fresh.

He parked outside Hargrove and Co. and sat in the car for a full minute before he went in, running through what he was about to ask her, and understanding, with a clarity that scared him more than the charter clause had, that there was no way to ask it that didn't risk everything, and no version of the next eleven days that he was willing to face with anyone else.