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.
If I made the softball team, Garrett was team captain. My mother, Patricia, had a special way of looking at me that made me feel like a rough draft, while Garrett was the finished masterpiece. So I left.
I packed one suitcase, took a bus to the city, and started over with nothing but two hundred dollars and a stubborn refusal to fail. Everyone back home thought I was struggling. They pictured me in some tiny apartment eating instant noodles—which was true for the first two years.
But what they didn’t know was that I took a job as a cleaning lady at a boutique hotel. And that job changed my life. I learned everything.
I watched. I studied. I worked my way up from cleaning rooms to front desk, to assistant manager, to manager.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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