PART 1
The moment I walked into that ballroom, I heard her say it. Sloan Whitmore—my brother’s perfect fiancée—leaned toward her bridesmaids with a glass of champagne in her manicured hand. Her whisper was loud enough to carry, and I knew she meant it that way.
“Oh, great. The little country girl is here.”
Her friends giggled like a pack of mean girls in designer dresses. Sloan didn’t even bother to look at me when she said it.
I was that insignificant to her—just some inconvenience that crawled out of a small town to ruin the aesthetic of her perfect engagement party. What Sloan didn’t know—what nobody in that room knew—was that I signed the deed to this hotel three years ago. The Monarch Hotel.
Every chandelier above her head. Every piece of silverware she was eating with. Every square inch of Italian marble beneath her overpriced heels.
It all belonged to me. And by the end of tonight, that whisper was going to cost her everything she ever wanted. My name is Bethany Burns.
I’m thirty-one years old, and I grew up in Milbrook, Pennsylvania—a town so small the only “traffic jam” we ever had was when old Mr. Henderson’s cows escaped and blocked Main Street for three hours. I left home when I was eighteen, and I never really looked back.
Not because I hated where I came from. Because my family made it crystal clear there wasn’t room for me there. I have an older brother, Garrett—the golden child.
The son who could do no wrong. Growing up, everything I did was measured against him, and I always came up short. If I got an A, Garrett got an A-plus.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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