One Night Bride

  One Night Bride

  Sarah J. Brooks

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  Special Invitation

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Preview of “The Billionaire’s Fake Marriage”

  About the Author

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  Copyright © 2018 by Sarah J. Brooks

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Facebook: Sarah J. Brooks

  Special Invitation

  Dear reader, thanks for reading my book! Be sure to join my newsletter to never miss a new release.

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  With love and talk soon,

  Sarah

  Chapter 1

  Xavier

  I hated Vegas. I remembered how much I hated Vegas when I stood there in the lobby of the Bellagio listening to the incessant dinging of the money stealing, soul-sucking contraptions simultaneously begging for my attention. This wasn’t my place; Vegas was never my thing. Unfortunately, being a famous fashion designer and a self-made multi-millionaire, Vegas was something I had to swallow at times. High rollers wanted to look their best. This was why my likeness was on a seventy-foot-tall billboard in the center of the Las Vegas strip. I was wearing only a pair of jeans, no shirt. The caption read “Bare it all, Xavier Dean.” It was titillating. I’d just been named one of the sexiest men of the year, and my PR company was taking advantage of it. One of the reasons I agreed to the billboard was I thought I’d never see it, and yet, here I was.

  While I was often here on business, this time I wasn’t. My best friend, Damon Rockwell was holding his bachelor party in Vegas of all the god-awful places, so I was drinking a big gulp of Vegas in a fancy, high octane, one hundred proof glass that scorched my throat as it went down. Damon and I grew up on the same street. We learned to skateboard with one another, and his grandmother made the best spaghetti with meatballs and homemade sauce. I can still taste it. My mother was never one for cooking. We were both raised in a moderate middle-class town where we weathered boyhood travails such as crushes on girls who were aloof and disinterested and learned to deal with the occasional bully. We found and defeated enemies attacking us on the X-box and went head to head, one upping each other in sports. We eventually matured, went to college and found different interests, but we remained friends.

  He became a lawyer and a staunch businessman and was marrying a stunning trophy wife in a week. The goal of this boys’ weekend with me and a few of his closest friends was to be mostly drunk and debaucherous, and all was going to plan. I, however, could only take so much drunken revelry and ducked out of the last event, which was a strip club where the girls offered special services after the show. I was not interested. After only twenty-four hours, the hedonistic lifestyle was wearing thin. Contrarily, Damon was enjoying himself. I was not. Standing in the casino with nothing to do, I thought about playing for an instant. I didn’t need to play for more money, I had more than enough for my lifetime and then some.

  My clothing brand was one of the most successful menswear brands in the world. I started out with a vision for men’s fashion and built it into a San Francisco-based fashion label which I simply entitled after myself: Xavier Dean Designs. My label nearly ran itself after a decade of success. I worked hard on creating elegant menswear, but I wasn’t so busy I couldn’t go out and have some fun. The trouble was, I wasn’t really having any fun.

  I was sitting at the bar trying to focus on the one thing that had caught my eye amid the dinging and clatter. In fact, it nearly dragged my eyes right out of my face. Bent over the craps table was the most perfectly formed ass I’d ever seen. It was round, firm, and delicious. Connected to that perfect ass was a pair of long shapely legs with a tiny little golden purse dangling at her hip.

  The dress she wore wasn’t as garish or offensive as some around me, too low cut for their shape or too high hemmed for their size but was an exquisite silhouette on a beautiful form. She was draped languidly over the table, nonchalant and almost bored. She wasn’t trying to entice anyone overtly, but thoughts of taking that ass on the table, holding it still and diving my cock right up into her pussy, were pretty all-consuming. The alcohol haze wasn’t doing anything to subdue my libido, so getting my mind off taking her from behind wasn’t going to happen.

  She seemed not to care about what others in the room thought of her. She had rings of golden hair with highlights that shone like strands of gold in the dim light. Her large round eyes made you weep, but her soft full lips were the real draw. I had a hard time taking my eyes off them as they screwed into a sneer when she threw the dice. It must have been habitual, but it was sexy as fuck.

  I’d be hard-pressed to find any man in the room not thinking about having their way with her, bent over the table as she was. I liked to wine and dine a woman into bed. Treating women well was my trademark and yet, I’d always leave behind a note the next morning thanking them for the fun without giving them so much as an email address. Some found me and tried to pursue something more, but most got the picture; I was only interested in one night. I wasn’t exactly a bastard. I had my reasons for not wanting complications to my already hectic life.

  Truthfully, it was much easier for me to commit to a one-night stand than it was to a mature relationship with its inevitable ups and downs, those were not the kinds of ups and downs I was looking for. Sex was fun, sex filled the gaps in my life when they were empty. I could count on one finger the number of truly committed relationships I’d had.

  Being in the fashion industry, there was no shortage of exquisite women to take to bed for the night, or sometimes more. One of my biggest issues was variety, there were simply too many to choose from. The other major challenge was a deep buried fear of getting too close. Lauren was, by all standards, one of the most beautiful women on the planet. I’d met her on the catwalk during fashion week. She wore this ridiculous peacock dress, a debut designer’s tour de force, that lit her up like a Cirque du Soleil poster; sexy, intriguing, evocative. It was an image that had you thinking of her long legs being bent over yours, contorting easily to accommodate your “love.”

  In reality, she was nothing like the image I, and many others who praised her saw in our minds. She was shy and lovely. She refused me too many times to count, so I settled for friendship. It was my
first and only friendship with a woman, and I desperately wanted to fuck her. Friendship with her didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try to let my cock get a chance at her; I tried often. I was good at trying. Being rich, I did way more than wine and dine her. I upped the ante with surprise vacations to Bali, weekend trips to Morocco on my private jet, a brand-new Mercedes, and a puppy.

  I worked hard to earn her trust and eventually her love, which finally brought me to the glorious moment a year later when we spent an entire day in a New York hotel room in bed. We fucked so hard we were both too sore to move the next day, so in essence, it was two glorious days in bed.

  She beckoned the “me” out of me, and I brought walls down for her that were tall and thick, just so I could bare my soul. We were in love, and it was terrifying. Lauren continued to work, and so did I. She was an East Coast girl, and I was a West Coast boy. Not wanting to claim too much of her independence, we managed to negotiate the long-distance thing pretty well. I trusted her, and in turn, she was trustworthy. I even considered marriage until I got the phone call. I can still remember every word, even though it was nearly five years ago.

  “Hello, may I speak to Xavier Dean please?” an officious voice asked.

  It was a somber voice, one that sent a shock of dread through your body without even knowing the reason for his call.

  “I’m sorry to inform you, sir, that Lauren McClure was on a small commuter jet that crashed just after takeoff this morning. She named you as her next of kin,” the grave voice said.

  She was coming to San Francisco as she did every weekend. I’d bought the ticket for her as I’d bought all of her weekend tickets. We used a private jet service because I didn’t want her on commercial flights. It wasn’t my jet, but one commissioned by my company. There was pilot error on takeoff, and all the people aboard the plane died, including Lauren, the most beautiful, kind, and loving woman I’d ever met. I made sure from that day forward that I never dated a “Lauren” again. Instead, I went for sexy, shallow one-night stands. Sex and only sex was going to be my game. If there was even a hint of friendship involved, I ran. So after paying the bartender for my top grade liquid hangover, I walked straight past the bouffant-haired seniors and the Hawaiian shirt-clad day trippers all hanging their hopes on a one-armed bandit and went straight to the ass calling my name.

  This woman with the perfect behind had swagger, I could say that much for her. She was probably just a little drunker than I was, leaning herself deeply over the craps table and giggling with another gambler who stood beside her. I don’t believe she was trying to flaunt that perfectly sumptuous body because it was doing a fine job without her. Adding to the attraction was an effervescent, gregarious, nature, gorgeous emerald green eyes, and cascades of golden hair. Around her neck was a curious necklace in the shape of an ankh made into a butterfly.

  As I approached, I noticed she was also the current winner, as she had many bets behind her roll. When I joined the table, she was talking about how Vegas messed with the body’s circadian rhythm and that was why people gambled so desperately. All the men and even the one woman stared at her in varying degrees of disbelief, as she continued to talk about how important our bodies’ natural rhythms are to our mental health.

  Who talks like that at a craps table in Vegas? I fucking loved her. It was hard to see in the dim light, but as I watched, she seemed to have an amber glow; a healthy tan. While Vegas was hot most of the time, her whole demeanor had such a windswept quality to it; I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d spent most of her life on the beach. She was too breezy and grounded to be a city girl and too sophisticated to be from the country, my guess was she was a mix of some kind. Whatever her reason for being here, I was going to make it my mission to find out more. Tonight, she would be my jackpot.

  She was laughing with the gambler on her right, her hair bouncing softly as her shoulders pulsed with a tittering that almost sounded genuine. She turned her head, and her eyes glanced at mine. There was fire. I knew I was a handsome man, one who needed nothing more than my mere presence to stir interest. Perhaps she recognized me; there was that billboard, and I was in a few commercials. My face was on all of our marketing, and so if you knew Xavier Dean Designs, you knew Xavier Dean.

  I was used to being in control and was naturally dominant. She sensed this immediately, but again, being her, she didn’t linger to consider me. Instead, her slender fingers plucked the two dice she wanted for her roll and sensuously let the white cubes tumble in her delicate grasp.

  Her bangles clanked gently as she massaged the dice, considering her roll perhaps or more likely employing an oddly effective means of seduction. While her eyes never strayed to mine, she was there with me, her body heat radiated, and I could smell the faint lavender in her perfume. Everything about her was poetry. While she may have been drunk, it only made her more fluid, more lyrical. She wasn’t slurring and sloppy but soft and sedated. Everyone at the table was mesmerized with her in an ethereal way. I wasn’t. I was a raging bull, my cock hardening with her nearness, her scent driving me mad.

  I wanted to take the palm of my hand, force her over the table, and let the dice tumble out of her beguiling hand. I’d take her fast and hard from behind, breaking her mystifying seduction as she panted and screamed out in ecstasy. I did everything in my power to keep from acting on my fantasy. I placed the maximum bid on the pass line, and this got me some curious looks, but not from her. She tipped a tiny bit farther over the table as her dress rose up her thigh. Her hand then lilted out in front of her sending the dice flying.

  “Seven!” the dealer yelled, and each of us won on her throw.

  A smile crossed her lips, and it was then she turned to regard me, her eyes making direct contact with mine. My cock nearly shot through my zipper.

  “Seven,” I rasped, confident and seductive as I angled towards her.

  She chucked her chin up toward the table, gesturing for me to place another bet, but never said a word. Again, I put down the maximum as she rolled an eight and side-eyed me with a snide grin as she rolled another eight. A bolt of electricity shot through the table as everyone gathered up their winnings. I took half my chips and left another maximum bid on the line. She placed a modest bid and turned to answer a question the man next to her had asked. He was in his late forties, past his age of attractiveness as evidenced by the pot belly barely concealed by his ill-fitting clothes. His smile was kind, though, and the shooter didn’t seem the kind to be rude.

  “Nice win, little lady,” he oozed. “You think I can buy you a drink? Sure like to say thanks,” he added as justification.

  It was all such utter bullshit. He wanted in her pants just as badly as I did. I laughed, not one to be rivaled. “I’ll buy you a Ferrari,” I boasted with a quiet seduction.

  I wasn’t sure she heard me until her emerald green eyes stabbed me again.

  “I’ll hold you to it,” she said. Her voice was rich and deep, unexpected.

  Although she was carefree, she was an expert at seduction. She could not give a shit about anyone in the room, even me; that’s what made her so remarkable. After we’d all placed our bets, I cast out the dice. While Craps was a game of chance, I put way too much into the throw. Both dice slammed against the walls of the table and tumbled to snake eyes.

  “Snakes, craps out!” the dealer yelled.

  Everyone at the table lost. I couldn’t care less; the money was nothing. She didn’t seem to care either, but her energy had shifted with lighting fast speed from nonchalant sex siren to bored craps player. She took her winning money and turned away from the table ready to move elsewhere.

  “Are you leaving?” I asked trying to halt her without grabbing her arm.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said with a smile.

  “Let me buy you a drink, it’s the least I can do for losing your money.” I was gregarious and playful. It was somewhat painful, but I thought matching her style might work.

  “I lost five dollars,” she said. “A
drink is never going to be enough to heal the pain.” She executed this sentence with a perfectly straight face.

  “Oh, that’s tragic,” I said. “I only lost five thousand, the least you could do is let a poor loser like me buy you a ten-dollar drink.” I flashed a seductive smile, lest she was missing my meaning.

  I didn’t want to be her buddy tonight unless it was her fuck buddy. I fully intended on our ten-dollar drink having some very thick strings attached. She must have sensed this as she shied away from me some.

  “Thanks, but I think you should save your money.” She was still playing with me, but cautiously.

  I could see the attraction in her eyes. There was no mistaking the way they’d misted over and her plump rosy lips parted. I presumed, however, her subconscious was being volleyed between the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other, with one noting I was the sexiest thing in the room and the other thoroughly convinced I was an enchanting serial killer.

  “I have quite a lot of it, I should be fine.” I smiled and extended my hand to her. “I’m Xavier Dean, and you are?”

  I instantly regretted introducing myself in that way. As I played the moment back in my head, there was no way of escaping how juvenile the approach was; like saying, “I have lots of money, and I’m famous”

  Perhaps she hadn’t heard of me. Seeing her eyes brighten and then recover confirmed she did know who I was.

  “Hi,” she sparkled. “I’m Arcadia Jones. I love your boxers; I wear them to bed.”

  Fuck me she was everything!

  “Well, not mine, surely,” I temped with a dark seductive domination. “Not yet at least.”

  “No, not yours,” she returned with a dry seduction. “I have my own.”

  Chapter 2

  Arcadia

  Oh, my God. Xavier Dean! The hottest fashion designer in the world. Of course, I knew who he was, I knew it the minute he walked over to the table. He was so much sexier in real life. He had a strongly sculpted face with ice blue eyes and tousled brown hair. I knew he was in his early forties, yet he had a unique and timeless look, reminding me of a romance novel cover. Not a slutty novel, but one where the hero sweeps the heroine off her feet being perfect and dashing.