Page 2 of Three Handsome Billionaires and a Pretend Fiancée

“Okay, please don’t be mad,” Lindsey squeaked. “Please, please, please… But McKenna…” She wrung her hands together, properly panicked now. “Please don’t hate me, cuz. I don’t know what went wrong. But I know how to fix it. I just need time. A lot of time and three buckets of conditioner.”

McKenna stood up and glanced at herself in the mirror before shuddering back in shock. Holy crap, she looked… scarily untamed, as if she belonged in the Pleistocene Epoch.

Chapter Two

McKenna looked like a science experiment gone wrong. Or as if two squirrels had a drunken fistfight in her hair and both of them won. She looked as if she had been wrestling with an electric socket and won. No, she looked like a cotton-top tamarin on a bad day.

Basically, earthlings could use her hair as an antenna to speak to green people in space.

Okay then.

“I’m so sorry,” Lindsey continued to cry. “It was supposed to be a 1960s beehive hairstyle, but your hair was too silky, and I think I over-teased and then over-sprayed when I tried to tame it, and it just got bigger and bigger. Oh my god, Mac, I’m so, so, so sorry.” Nearly sobbing and completely distraught, she started to rummage through a crate of hair products.

“I’m going to fix it, I promise. I just need you to sit down again.” She held two mega-sized bottles of conditioner in her hands.

Well, crap again, McKenna thought. The hair on her head looked nothing like a perfectly coiffed beehive. No. She looked like a dysfunctional bird with a hoarding infliction and probably a drinking problem too had decided to build a nest, forgot what she was doing, and threw a tantrum on McKenna’s head instead.

Okay, enough of what she looked like. She had to go with it now.

“I know you’re busy with work, but I’m going to need time to untangle everything. I’m so sorry, Mac.”

Nope, not today. She was already running late, and in the space of the jump scare she had given herself from looking in the mirror, her phone had pinged six times in succession. She had a job to do.

“It’s fine. I have to go. I’ll see you later,” she said as she glanced at her phone. Oh, great. Madame Tara had left a message to tell her the fake fiancées were available, and McKenna could come by with the NDAs for them to sign.

What a relief. Now she could put a green tick to the second thing on her to-do list.

“You can’t go out looking like that, Mac,” Lindsey shrieked as McKenna gathered up her handbag with her planner inside, laptop bag, flask, and a bouquet of flowers, which she didn’t want to leave in the car to wilt while Lindsey used her as a guinea pig, only to turn her into a feral rat woman instead.

McKenna raised her hand above her head in an attempt to flatten the monstrosity down a bit, but it felt like concrete.

“Do you have a hat I could use?” McKenna asked, looking around her cousin’s open-plan studio apartment.

“No hat is not going to cover that up,” Lindsey wailed, more incredulous that McKenna wanted to go out into civilization with that on her head. “Mac, you really can’t go out looking like that. You’ll get arrested or something, I’m sure. You’ll scare children. I need to douse you with a truckload of conditioner. Oh god, Mac, I’m so sorry. I destroyed your hair.” Lindsey put her face in both of her hands.

“Don’t worry about it,” McKenna said. “We’ll sort it out later. Look,” she added, plucking off a rose from the bouquet she was carrying and sticking it into her hair. “Now it looks deliberate. See? I have to go. I’ll call you later.”

She still had things to do and places to go.

But it was fine. Everything was fine. So people looked at her as if she’d freshly landed on planet Earth, but hey, she bedazzled her shoes so they wouldn’t be looking at her ordinary face. Now they were looking at her head instead of her shoes. Same thing.

She quickly dropped off the check at the animal shelter, much to the bewilderment of the volunteers at the sight of her hair. Also, not much she could do either about their disappointment when they’d gotten dressed up thinking they were going to be standing next to the hottest bachelors alive and got her instead, hair and all.

Well, sorry. She carried that big-assed cardboard check proudly and took the picture.

On her way out of the shelter, she came across the cutest little black and white fluff ball of a kitten she had ever seen. Her brain whizzed with excitement. Perfect. Given who she worked for and the fat check she had just dropped off on their behalf, adopting the kitten took minutes.

Now she had to carry her laptop, her handbag, the flowers, a kitten, her flask of coffee, and Medusa’s head to Madame Tara to seal the deal.

Her bosses had barely given her any time to come up with three pretend fiancées, springing the assignment on her not more than twelve hours ago. But she’d nailed the task like the pro she was, and Madame Tara, from Private Companions, had been a serendipitous find and had cost her bosses a tiny fortune to procure. And no, Private Companions was not that kind of an escort service, so their site said.

All three girls were super intelligent and educated, spoke multiple languages, were well-traveled, and weren’t unfamiliar with NDAs from rich men. She didn’t care why her three bosses suddenly needed a woman each they would call their fiancée. It was none of her beeswax.

Speaking of bees and wax, for that matter, she automatically raised her hand above her head to see if she could flatten the mangled cone of concrete protruding from her skull, only to find it may have hardened even more.

Madame Tara kept smiling at her with curious eyes—it was the hair obviously—and the three pretend fiancées did the same once they signed their NDAs.

In person, they were in a word ethereal. Tall, willowy-like supermodels, so magnificently beautiful she couldn’t stop staring at them. For all she knew, once her bosses saw the women she had chosen for them, they would fall in love with them for real. At that precise moment, an uneasy knot pulled at her stomach, and she took it as a reminder to get something to eat at some point. Contrary to personal opinion, she couldn’t live off coffee alone.

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