Paper Wedding, Best-Friend Bride
Sheri WhiteFeather
Carol Lawrence stood in her boss’s luxurious high-rise office, with a zillion things running through her mind. Being Jake Waters’s personal assistant was a demanding job, with most of her duties centered on organizing his social life. No doubt about it, the jet-setting real estate mogul kept her on her toes. Not only did he travel for work, purchasing properties all over the globe, he was the consummate party boy, dashing off to exotic locations with models and actresses and whoever else struck his rich-guy fancy.
Jake sat on the corner of his desk and flung his jacket over his unused chair. As always, his shirtsleeves were rolled up, exposing the colorful tattoos on his arms, and his dark brown hair was in sexy disarray. With his disheveled good looks and need for speed, he reminded her of James Dean, except that Jake was half-Choctaw, his mixed-blood heritage lending his features an uncommon beauty.
He certainly wasn’t the type of man she should be attracted to. He was too wild for a practical girl like her. Carol spent her free time on a nice, quiet quilting hobby, whereas Jake raced sports cars as his outlet. To her that seemed like an especially reckless thing for him to do, given that his entire family had been killed in a car crash, sending him into foster care as a child. Carol had also lost her family and become a foster kid, as well. But they didn’t know each other back then, and the tragedies they’d both suffered didn’t make for good bedfellows.
Still, she often wondered what taming a man like Jake would involve. Yeah, right. If the glamorous beauties he dated couldn’t pin him down, then a simple gal with tidy blond hair and a sensible nature would never fit the bill. Jake was a thirty-one-year-old billionaire who’d even made some crazy internet “Beefcake Bachelor” list as one of the sexiest single men in Southern California. Women chased him with a vengeance. Of course, some of them kept trying to fix him, with the assumption that he was damaged from the loss of his family, using his free-spirited lifestyle to hide the pain. Carol didn’t doubt that was true. She knew the anguish that being orphaned could cause. But her coping mechanism was much gentler than his. Someday she longed to get married and have children of her own, recapturing the home and hearth she’d lost.
Jake glanced up and caught her gaze, and a fluttery sensation erupted in her stomach, something that happened far too often when she was in his presence.
Determined to maintain her composure, Carol focused on her job. “So,” she said, “are you going to attend Lena’s birthday celebration?” Lena was a pop star with a penchant for partying who ran in the same live-for-the-moment circle as
