Chapter 2
TWO
Wes
“She’s going to eat you alive,” Jesse says, like he’s looking forward to it.
Lottie’s exit was so abrupt I almost missed the way she looked as she stormed out.
Almost. Fitted jeans on a body that makes it difficult to concentrate on anything else.
A round ass you couldn’t ignore if you tried on a body I’ve spent a fair amount of time wondering what it would feel like to worship.
Every single gorgeous inch. It’s been a problem for me and my right hand ever since I first saw her last year at a brewery in town with Jesse and Madeline.
I still remember being mesmerized by the way she laughed that night, cheeks flushed, head tipped back.
She wasn’t laughing today, though. In fact, before she turned and marched out of the Cove office, she looked at me like she could kill me. And I can’t really blame her. I’m still not quite sure how I landed us both in this mess.
I turn my attention to Ford, who’s sitting behind his desk with his attention locked on me. Jesse’s in one of the chairs across from him looking much more relaxed. He’s leaning back, his legs stretched out in front of him, like he’s settled in for a show.
“She’s not going to eat me alive,” I say finally.
Jesse huffs out a laugh. “Wes, she stormed into the office like a hurricane and left the same way. In between, she screamed at you. She’s going to destroy you, man.”
I sigh. Jesse isn’t wrong. I swear Lottie was one second away from flipping the boardroom table.
Ford leans back in his chair, watching me closely, his expression hard to read. “She was pretty angry,” he agrees. “I doubt she’s going to go along with this.”
I finally glance up at him. “You don’t know that.”
Jesse raises a brow. “No, but I do. I know Lottie better than either of you. She’s Madeline’s best friend.”
“I’ll talk to her,” I tell them.
That earns me a look, not just from Jesse but from Ford too.
Jesse leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Okay,” he says slowly. “So, explain to me how this is going to go. You sit her down, tell her again that you want the world to think you’re married, and she just… what? Agrees to play along?”
I don’t answer right away because hearing it out loud makes it sound ridiculous, and it probably is.
This whole mess started from nothing. We went out for my brother’s birthday—nothing wild, just dinner here in Deep Cove.
A photographer from some gossip site caught us leaving, my hand on Lottie’s back, her head tilted toward me, her ring catching just enough light to turn something completely innocent into something else entirely.
By morning, the rumors were everywhere. Lottie and I were in a secret relationship—not just that, we were secretly married.
The story took on a life of its own before I had the chance to shut it down.
And I should have shut it down. But then Cove’s new publicist, Victoria Hale, caught wind of the whole thing and instead of issuing a statement to deny the rumors, she leaned into them.
According to Victoria, this is just what the company needs right now. Good news. Even if none of it is true.
After the past year, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring narratives that work in our favor.
Cove weathered a PR storm that put the company under a microscope, forcing us to rebuild trust piece by piece.
And just as the dust of that crisis started to settle, my past came back to haunt me—an arrest from my senior year of high school that threatened to tarnish not only my name, but the brand my brothers have worked so hard to build.
It’s something I’ve been trying to leave behind me for a very long time.
When I was 18, a couple of guys I grew up with—guys I thought were my best friends—decided it would be a good idea to break into one of the older houses in town.
They thought it would be harmless, something stupid they could laugh about after.
So, they went in through a basement window one night and pocketed cash and some jewelry and then they took off—but not before the old guy who lived there walked in and was so terrified he just about had a heart attack.
I didn’t know anything about it until I saw them running down the street while I was on my way home that night.
They flagged me down, asking for a ride like they had a hundred times before.
I gave them one without asking any questions, didn’t think twice about it.
I didn’t find out what they had done until the next day when the police started knocking on doors.
There was security footage of my car near the house, a timeline that lined up just well enough to make it believable, and a reputation that didn’t exactly work in my favor.
The Winters name already carried weight in this town, and not the kind that helps.
My dad was an alcoholic—after our mom died when we were kids, he lost his job and started spending more time at the bar than he did at home.
My brothers and I were basically left to raise ourselves, and people in this town assumed they knew who we’d grow up to be.
My arrest was the proof they’d been waiting for.
At first, I was na?ve enough to think it would all sort itself out. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, so I figured someone would step forward, that the truth would eventually come out.
It didn’t.
Unlike me, the other guys had families with money and lawyers on speed dial.
They had futures already waiting for them: one had a scholarship to UCLA, the other had a full ride for hockey.
I didn’t have anything like that. No plan.
No direction. No one expecting anything better from me than what I was being accused of.
A muscle tightens in my jaw as the memory settles in, familiar and unwelcome all at once.
The police told me if I just admitted it, I could probably plead out.
Avoid it turning into something worse. So, I made a choice to save my brothers from having to endure a trial and to protect my friends who had their lives all mapped out. I lied and said that I did it.
I ended up with community service and probation. Enough to keep it quiet, but not enough to make it disappear. In a town like this, it never does. The whispers follow you. The looks linger a little too long. People decide who you are, and once they do, there’s no changing their minds.
So, I left the day after graduation. I packed what I had, got on a bus, and didn’t look back. I needed distance. A chance to start over in a place where people hadn’t already made up their minds about me. I went to live with my uncle.
He was a retired pilot, the kind of man who didn’t say much but knew exactly how to keep you steady.
He was everything my dad wasn’t, and being around someone calm, someone consistent—it mattered more than I probably understood at the time.
He took me in and gave me a place to live.
And somewhere along the way, he put me in a cockpit.
From day one, flying made sense in a way nothing else did. It gave me direction. Something to focus on. Five years later, I was flying commercial, thousands of feet in the air where the past couldn’t reach me.
While I was away I stayed close to my brothers Ford, Jesse, and Noah. I would visit them in Deep Cove, but I never landed there for too long. When Ford asked me to help with the business he was building, of course I said yes, but he always understood that I had a career of my own as well.
That was years ago. Now Cove is a huge success, but not so big that it can’t be rocked by scandal. And this past year has brought a lot of that. Too much.
I hate knowing that part of that is my fault.
“Lottie’s furious,” Jesse continues, stating the obvious now. “And not the quietly seething type of furious. She’s out loud, in your face, not backing down, fucking furious.”
“You think I didn’t notice that?”
“I’m just telling you that she’s not one of those people who just rolls with things,” he says. “Your plan to just talk her into agreeing to this is not going to work.”
Jesse is right. Lottie is a firecracker. She’s impulsive, outspoken, and completely unwilling to sit back and accept something she disagrees with without a fight. Which means that asking her to go along with this isn’t just unrealistic, it’s like asking her to go against who she is.
Ford studies me for a second longer, measured and deliberate. “Victoria’s not wrong about the strategy,” he says. “I’m just not sure how you’re going to convince Lottie. There’s nothing in it for her.”
Victoria’s strategy is simple, at least on paper.
When my past resurfaced, it breathed new life into old assumptions.
That I’m a troublemaker. A problem. Not the kind of guy the Cove board wants tied to the company.
Anything that damages me has the potential to damage the brand.
They can’t afford to risk that right now.
So now they want the opposite. Not reckless and out of control, but stable and reliable. And according to Victoria, the fastest way to shift a narrative is to give people something solid to believe in. A love story. A marriage. Something they want to root for.
Lottie fits that story perfectly. She’s smart, beautiful, composed. Standing next to her makes me look better. And if it improves how people see me, it improves how they see Cove too.
That’s all the board needs it to do.
“I’m not expecting her to just go along with this.”
That seems to catch Ford off guard. “Then what are you expecting?”
I shrug. “That she’ll listen.”
“And if she doesn’t?” Jesse asks.
I meet his gaze evenly. “She will.”
He shakes his head, a grin pulling at his mouth. “You’re delusional.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But I have a plan.”
I’ve dealt with bigger complications than Lottie Hart.
I’ve just never had to marry them.