King's Ransom (Oil Kings Book 2) Read online

  King's Ransom

  Oil Kings - Book Two

  Marie Johnston

  LE Publishing

  Copyright © 2020 by Marie Johnston

  Editing by Razor Sharp Editing

  Proofing by iScream Proofreading

  Cover Art by Secret Identity Graphics

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters, places, and events in this story are fictional. Any similarities to real people, places, or events are coincidental and unintentional.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  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

  About the Author

  Also by Marie Johnston

  It was supposed to be a simple case of revenge: get to know King Tech owner and CEO Beckett King, learn his secrets, and ruin his life like he ruined my brother’s. But Beckett King offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse.

  Not only does he want me to pretend to be engaged to him, he needs to marry me to get his grandmother off his back. And at the end of the year, we can go our separate ways, only I’ll be a whole lot richer.

  I won’t fall for his irresistible good looks, or that aw, shucks country-boy charm he still possesses from growing up on a ranch. I am smarter than that. He has a lesson to learn and I am the best one to teach him.

  But that’s the tricky thing with revenge. It doesn’t always go as planned.

  Chapter 1

  Eva

  Adam wasn’t fit to care for himself. I sighed and pressed my hand to my forehead. In the kitchen, my brother couldn’t see me from his standard spot on the couch. If he stayed there any longer, he was going to grow roots.

  The backs of my eyes stung, but tears wouldn’t fall. They never did. Crying was a luxury. I had too much to do.

  Sighing, I pulled the plug in the sink. I had a day off for once, but I wasn’t going to lay idle.

  Popping out of the kitchen, I veered to the window and opened the blinds. Light streamed in, chasing away the shadows, but not the ones that lingered in my brother’s eyes.

  One more time for good measure, I cursed the man who had done this to him, then plastered on a pleasant smile. “I’m going out for a bit.”

  Adam didn’t spare me a glance as he focused on his multiplayer game. “’K.”

  He’d woken up before ten in the morning and I’d even gotten him to eat breakfast. It was a good day for him.

  “Need anything?” He needed food and a job, one from the many applications he’d submitted—if he’d actually uploaded his resume and hit submit. I had my suspicions. We needed so much, but with only one of us working, it was all I could do to keep the internet on. Without it, I feared what the extra empty time would drive Adam to do.

  “Nope.”

  Stepping back into the kitchen, I grabbed one of my to-go bags of cat food. Outside, I locked the door and peered down each side of our apartment.

  The setup was like a one-story row house. Each apartment shared its walls with its neighbors and had an outside entrance. No garage, which sucked in the winter, but I took the light-rail as much as possible.

  Adam and I had grown up here and it had felt like a home when our parents were alive. I couldn’t name many of our neighbors. The guy to our left was my age, and from the number of random guys doing the walk of no-shame in the early morning hours, he was single and loving it.

  The couple to our right fought all the time and I certainly knew his name. It was Mike You Motherfucker. Their fights were only verbal so far and they were in the off portion of their on-again, off-again relationship.

  The other person in our fourplex was an elderly lady who had seemed ancient when I was five. She didn’t want to talk to us any more now than she had twenty years ago.

  I stopped before hitting the sidewalk. At the end of the building, a line of shrubs had started losing their leaves for the winter even though it was late August.

  “Here, Kitty.” If the other tenants knew about Kitty, they didn’t care. I’d found her last year as a kitten, but since Adam was allergic, I couldn’t take her in. She wouldn’t have let me anyway. It’d only been recently, and with a lot of feedings, that she’d let me get this close.

  “Hey,” I cooed. Squatting, I stretched my arm through a break in the branches to pour the food into the little plastic dish I’d set out—and froze. “Oh, Kitty.”

  The cat was there, curled up in a pile of leaves. At her belly was a mass of squirming fur. Kittens.

  I poured the food into her dish and counted her kittens. One, two, three, four—holy shit—five kittens. She gave me a lazy blink.

  “Mama’s tired? I would be too.” I wanted to pet her, but I hadn’t fully earned her trust. The food in the dish looked like a pittance. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to feed her more, but I had me and Adam to buy food for too.

  The feeling swarmed over me. The one full of desperation, where I wondered how in the hell I was going to keep going until eternity claimed me. There was a time I’d wanted more in life. Today, I’d settle for more cat food.

  Straightening, I shoved the empty baggie in my pocket. All baggies got reused. Ramming my hands in the pockets of my jeans, I followed the same path I did every day, but instead of heading toward my catering gig or the place I bartended, I was going to the heart of Denver.

  I was looking for a man. Why today of all days, I didn’t know, only that I was sick of stalking him online. It was time to see him in person. I needed to see him to fuel my anger, to motivate me to work harder to help Adam through his deep depression, to hang around long enough to see my brother prove this motherfucker wrong.

  I was looking for the man who’d ruined my brother’s life.

  Chapter 2

  Beckett

  I regretfully inform you that I’m handing in my resignation, effective immediately.

  Archiving the email, I tossed the phone on the seat next to me. Another one gone. Being my assistant wasn’t that hard, but it wasn’t the easy pass to becoming a millionaire so many seemed to expect.

  Across from me, Dad sipped his brandy, his eyes pensive as he looked at my phone. We were somewhere above Montana, where I had flown out for his impromptu wedding to Kendall Brinkley. I was still salty about it. She was closer to my age than his. I couldn’t imagine how ashamed my mother would be if she were alive.

  I’d thought Grams would lose it, but she’d been stoic during the entire ceremony. Mama had been gone a long time, but it couldn’t be easy for Grams to watch her former son-in-law marry a woman the same age as his own children.

  But at least Dad’s wedding had given me a brief reprieve from her meddling. For a woman who hadn’t been terribly involved in my childhood, she was certainty invested in one specific aspect of my future now.

  “Trouble in paradise?” Dad asked.
/>
  “There is no paradise when I need an assistant and Grams sends prospective fiancées my way. How did she even find out Wilma quit?” But then Grams had talked to my former assistant more than me. Wilma was younger than Grams, but only by about fifteen years, and I missed more than her punctual and proficient work ethic.

  I didn’t have the heart to turn away the women Grams funneled toward my job opening. Only my open position was not the missionary position, or the wheelbarrow, and it definitely wasn’t on one knee to propose. Three of her candidates had already passed through my office and left as soon as they’d realized the only payday they’d hit was their paycheck. Which was still a damn good wage—just not my inheritance.

  “She got Aiden married off, now she’s turning on you. I’ll talk to her if you want, Beckett.” He was the only one close to me who called me Beckett instead of Beck. “But I’m not her favorite person right now. Still, I can’t blame her, though I’d rather you fall in love and get married instead of what your grandmother wants.”

  “I’m doing fine on my own.” My net worth had hit nine digits months ago.

  “Your grandparents worked hard for that money.”

  “They got lucky.” Finding that much oil on our land was only the beginning. It had happened during my grandpa’s day, when Mama was just a kid. Dad had been her high school sweetheart and had gone on to spearhead the company after they married.

  “Your grandparents worked hard on that land and dedicated their lives to the company. You wouldn’t be using this private jet to fly back to Denver if it weren’t for them.” Dad set his drink down and leaned forward. I refrained from mentioning that I could buy my own Gulfstream, but it seemed a waste when I could use my family’s plane. “Your grandparents secured the inheritance you’re so willing to give away.”

  “I’m not exactly willing to whore myself—or anyone else—out for it either.”

  “None of us want you to.”

  I gave him a pointed look.

  “You’re right, but Grams wouldn’t consider it whoring. She’d call it a business deal.” Dad ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. If he chose to cover his gray, he’d look like he was in his mid-thirties instead of pushing fifty. “Like I said, I can’t blame her. You can’t fall in love if you don’t date, and I want to see you happy. I’d like to see you happy with that money. None of us wants to see the other option happen.”

  I scowled and looked away. Why, Mama? Why? The rules for the trust were clear, and Mama had built in guardrails. Not only did I have to get married, but I had to stay married for a year. So, yeah, I could find a partner in crime, get legally wed, stay that way for a year, then divorce her and we’d each leave with half.

  And if I did that, I would be no better than my older brother. Aiden had found a genuinely nice woman to marry and ignore, a woman who’d had no idea she was just a payday.

  But if I didn’t do the same, then the family responsible for Mama’s death would become filthy rich.

  “If the Cartwrights get what’s ours…” Dad’s jaw flexed and his gaze flicked to where his new, young bride dozed in a recliner. “I will respect your decision not to marry by your next birthday if that’s what you choose, but dammit, they’ve taken enough.”

  The pain in Dad’s voice startled me. The guy had just said round two of his “I dos” and he sounded as devastated about Mama’s death as the year it had happened.

  I lowered my voice out of respect for Kendall. I had to admit, she didn’t seem like the gold digger I’d first assumed she’d be. Who knows how she felt about Mama, but she’d just said her vows in front of her new husband’s four adult kids, so it wasn’t like Mama was a secret.

  I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. My own work was waiting if I wanted to keep my millions, which now included assistant duties until I filled the position. Yet, when I looked at Dad, his face was lined with more stress than a newlywed should have. “Is Grams riding your ass about this too?”

  Surprise flickered through his eyes. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”

  I laughed. “It’s not like she can threaten your position at the company. You’ve been there thirty years.”

  “Right.” Dad’s chuckle was uneasy.

  I’d kept out of the oil business. When I was a little kid, Dad had worked for the family business while still managing the ranch. Then Grams and DB—what we called our dearly departed grandpa, Donald Boyd—had sold a leasehold for a ridiculous amount of money and retired, leaving Dad in charge. DB Industries had become King Oil. Almost half of that money had been gifted to Mama and Dad, the rest separated into a trust for each of us.

  Fuck. Grams wielded plenty of power at the company. Was that how she’d gotten Aiden to marry? “I’ll think about it, all right?”

  It was bad enough dating as one of the Kings from King Oil. Getting into a relationship as a CEO with a demanding job had its own challenges that I was yet unwilling to deal with. But it was much harder dating after Grams had hinted to every single prospective woman in a ten-state radius that marrying me equaled a lot of money for them. Grams’s focus wasn’t on who should get the money or who would really benefit from it, but on who shouldn’t.

  Dad leaned back in his chair and picked up his drink. “Look, your mother had a soft spot for the Cartwrights that I’ll never understand.” He jerked his gaze out the plane window, his jaws flexing. “If Sarah had known how much her mother would interfere with your lives, she wouldn’t have set it up like she did. And if Grams had known what she had planned, the check from the leasehold sale would’ve been in my name.” A sigh leaked out of him and for a brief second, he looked his age. “Knowing any of you had arranged a fake marriage just to get the money would kill her.”

  I understood Mama’s nostalgia for the Cartwrights. She had been best friends with one of them and probably would’ve married our trashy neighbor if she hadn’t had a fling with Dad that resulted in Aiden. She’d taken to Danny’s daughter Bristol like a second mom every chance she could. Mama’s heart had been in the right place, but her mind had taken the day off when she’d set up the trust.

  Instead, her good intentions had become a reverse ransom: produce a wife and then get the money. Happiness for either party didn’t factor into the equation, but then I guess that was what Grams thought the money was for.

  Chapter 3

  Eva

  “Well, don’t just stand there. Come inside and get to work.”

  The brusque, cultured voice behind me rumbled through my body. Whoever it was stood close. Was he talking to me?

  I didn’t know anyone in this part of town, unless I’d served them at some fancy reception. But I’d bet my nonexistent life savings that I was as nameless and faceless to them now as I had been then. The catered events I worked at weren’t held for people like me. And people like the ones flowing around me weren’t patrons of the bar I worked at either.

  Denver pedestrians swirled around me. I’d been hit up for spare change at least three times on my stroll from the light-rail to Beckett King’s spot of prime realty. I was used to blending into the background. Today, it didn’t take a white shirt and black slacks. I fit in with the panhandlers in my regular, worn clothing.

  “I’m impressed,” the man continued. “He worked fast. Were you waiting in reserve?”

  Arrogance poured off the words. Whoever this man was, I didn’t like him. I took my time turning around in case he was talking to me. My lungs froze. Yes, the man was talking to me—and it wasn’t just some stranger. It was him.

  Unfortunately, I’d know him anywhere. Internet stalking had given me plenty of pictures to stare at. One night, I’d even fallen asleep with his photo on my phone. Good thing Adam hadn’t seen or he might’ve gotten the wrong idea.

  Dark eyes glared at me, the muscles of his jaw flexing as if looking at me physically hurt. The rich bastard probably thought I was more likely to ask him for a buck or two than enter one of the offices around here.

 
“Go on,” he said. “I can see Grams is trying another route this time.” His dismissive gaze swept down my pale-blue fitted knit sweater, past my skinny jeans, and down to my Toms. From the way his lips flattened, he didn’t like what he saw. I’m sure my disheveled pixie hair cut didn’t fit his opinion of how a proper lady should look.

  “Excuse me?” Did he know me? He shouldn’t know me. But that tone of his—if he offered me a dollar, I would whip him with it.

  He tipped a dark brow and a smug smile curved lips that were hard not to stare at. So I swept my gaze over his body, adopting the same dismissive expression he had. The look was hard to maintain. It was like scowling at a beautiful sculpture.

  His traditional black suit was fitted in the trendy slim style that accentuated his wide shoulders and long legs. And the way his maroon tie offset his black vest made me want to rip his suit jacket off to see what he looked like without it.

  Dapper was the word that entered my mind. As if I’d been born a hundred years ago instead of twenty-five.

  “Like what you see?” His tone was wry. My gaze flipped up to his. Self-confidence butted against smugness in his expression. He looked good and he knew it.

  I scrambled for words before Yes, yes I do like what I see could slip out. “I’m not a suit girl.”

  The smug smirk lightened to a real smile. “Is that how you talk to your boss?”

  “No?” What was he talking about? Had I been plotting against a madman? If so, that’d suck the wind right out of my sails. It was hard to get revenge on a guy who didn’t understand reality. That’d make me the villain in my sad story.