Which left him right in the middle of a row of cutesy, godforsaken little shops with stone fronts and colorful signs. Tourist traps. One of them had a sign in the window announcing that they carried Sol Gen. Great. He felt far more at home knowing that his shoes made it all the way out here into the middle of butt fucking nowhere.
He’d renamed the company after he took over. Shortened the name until it was a clever play on words that wasn’t a mouthful and didn’t include his last name. Morgan’s Soles & Genesis Footwear just didn’t have the same ring.
Mostly because unless it was the flavor of the week or a close member of his company or the guy he bought insurance from, people didn’t give a shit who he was. His name didn’t matter. What mattered was the shoe itself, a fast-flowing name and a killer logo.
No, his name really didn’t mean shit. Except to Noemi. She’d decided that she hated his name enough, his last name, and likely his first as well, that she didn’t want to have anything to do with it. She’d risk disappearing into some mundane existence, leave the comforters of her own home, leave the safety of everyone around her, give up all her precious charities, just to avoid marriage with him.
Byron hunched his shoulders and eyed the shitty looking coffee shop across the street. A bunch of hipster wannabe, wasted generation style kids sat outside at brightly colored, mismatched bistro sets, sipping on eight dollar coffees instead of actually getting off their duffs and doing something with their lives. One of them even had a man bun. Fuck, he wanted to cut that thing off almost as much as he wanted to go stabby style on whoever leaked the merger. Was it possible to shear a bun off with a shoe? Fuck, he wished. Maybe he should design something with hidden blades…
It was early. He’d caught the red-eye from New York and rented a car. A shitty sedan so he’d blend in. Be like everyone else. Except he didn’t blend in. He didn’t look like everyone else. He’d have to lose the suit. And actually force himself to enter the wretched shops on the street to ask if anyone had seen his fiancé.
And right.
No women.
He was supposed to be engaged.
Didn’t matter that De’Luco had just broken the news to his daughter two days ago. Or that it still wasn’t public knowledge. Didn’t matter that she didn’t have a ring or that the only things they knew about each other were what they’d read online. It. Didn’t. Matter.
He was engaged and life as he knew it was pretty much over. He wouldn’t get lucky and be able to have one of those open marriages. De’Luco wanted it to be the real deal. He wanted it so badly that he’d made the merger conditional on their marriage. He was willing to force his daughter into a loveless union. He was that desperate for it.
Except life wasn’t a fairy tale and shit didn’t work out just like in books. No one got a happy ending. No one fell magically in love after that ring was in place. In Byron’s experience, once those rings got slipped on, it signaled the death of love, not the birth of it. He could count on one hand the number of marriages he knew where the people in them were actually happy. And he knew a lot of married people.
De’Luco hadn’t said divorce wasn’t an option, though, and being a smart guy, Byron had done some research and come up with a proposal.
He just had to find his fiancé and get her to agree to it.
CHAPTER 2
Noemi
Noemi De’Luco was pretty sure that her fiancé was the devil. Not that he was her real fiancé. She’d fixed that by taking off. There was no way she was going to marry a man who she’d only ever seen once, in the grainy picture her dad provided, printed off some internet site.
The picture was black and white and grainy, and she hadn’t bothered to do any further research. Her dad, who she thought treasured her and wanted the best for her, who actually wanted her to have a loving marriage and a beautiful future, informed her that she was going to marry some rich stranger who was no doubt a pig and a bastard who wanted something from their family, as all men she’d ever known did, and she was done.
She’d hung around for approximately five seconds before scurrying off to her room to pack a suitcase. She waited until her dad was asleep and he never bothered to check on her, wanting to do the nice thing and give her space. Which was a load of crap, given that he’d demanded she marry a complete stranger like it was eighteen fricking hundred and she was chattel to be handed off to the highest bidder. She’d waited a couple of hours after he turned in for the night before she snuck out. She called for a cab and arrived at the airport with no destination in mind. She just wanted to be far away from New York. She’d never liked it much anyway. She missed their home in Italy but after her mother passed away, her dad couldn’t stand to be there, like even the country reminded him too much of her and he couldn’t bear it.