Sweetheart Bride: A Tropical Billionaire Marriage of Convenience (Brides of Paradise Book 2) Read online

  Growing up on the tropical paradise of St. John, environmentalist Ellie Green had three goals: study ecology, save the planet, and marry Ryan Andersen, the dreamy older boy who hung out at the Paradise Resort next door. Ten years later, Ellie’s college plans are in ruins and the planet isn’t saved, but she still has a chance to marry Ryan. All she has to do is help him bulldoze her childhood home and build an island-destroying casino.

  Charismatic billionaire Ryan Andersen has it all: money, girlfriends, a generous nature that turns strangers into lifelong friends, and a talent for starting businesses. But Ryan’s never managed to stick with any business—or girlfriend—for long. Ryan’s gambled his fortune on developing the property next door to the Paradise Resort into a world-class casino, but when he finds himself accidentally handcuffed to Ellie Green, he’s forced to introduce her to his family as his fiancée. Now Ryan has to decide whether to scrap the casino and lose the respect of his family or build it and break the heart of the idealistic young woman he’s starting to love.

  Join my Readers Group and receive a FREE Brides of Paradise short story. You’ll be the first to hear about new releases and giveaways - but never spam.

  Sweetheart Bride

  A Tropical Billionaire Marriage of Convenience

  Brides of Paradise #2

  Vicky Loebel

  Discover more titles at www.vickyloebel.com

  Copyright

  © 2016 Vicky Loebel

  Sweetheart Bride

  ISBN 978-0-9908033-3-1

  FIRST EDITION, version 1.0

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be resold, given away, or quoted extensively (except in reviews). If you’re reading this book and it was not purchased for your use, please consider purchasing your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of authors everywhere.

  Formatted & Published Internationally by Pentachronistic™ Press. Cover ©2016 Pentachronistic™ Press. Cover by Jaycee Delorenzo of Sweet’n Spicy Designs; Cover photo credits: ©Fotalia.com/ popovich22. This is a work of fiction. The characters and most of the settings are imaginary. Any resemblance to actual people or events is coincidental and unintended.

  The Brides of Paradise series is dedicated to my amazingly supportive sisters:

  Dusky, Karen, and Julia

  Special thanks to test readers Alison Hentges, Carol Lynn, Julia Richards, and Rose Ortiz, and to my editor, Dusky Loebel of IndieCopyEdits.com, who all contributed greatly to making this a better book.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  More Books to Enjoy

  Chapter One

  St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands

  Ellie Green couldn’t wait to get home and give her Granny Gigi a hug.

  “Thanks, Pete.” She dropped her duffel on the boat dock of the Paradise Resort and dug a soggy twenty-dollar bill out of her jacket—all that remained of the twenty-five thousand dollars she’d set out to save the world with four years ago.

  Warm rain drizzled out of bloated gray clouds. Ferryman Pete’s eyes traveled from Ellie’s twenty to her thin T-shirt and patched waterproof duffle. “Don’ worry about it.” He waved her money away. “Welcome home.”

  A storm swell rocked the boat, heaving the ramp in the air. Four tourists—pea green after their short boat ride from St. Thomas—staggered down the incline to the dock. Ellie helped Pete load their suitcases onto the electric cart that would carry them uphill to the Paradise Resort lobby. The August storm that had delayed her return home had hit the resort hard, crushing flowerbeds, ripping branches off of trees, although beneath the mess, the place seemed to be prospering.

  “Just make sure,” Pete said between bags, “you talk to Doris before headin’ next door.”

  Ellie smiled vaguely. The resort concierge was an old family friend who’d given Ellie her first job as a gardener. But why visit Doris before Gran? Unless Pete thought Ellie had gotten too old to climb the locked gate between properties.

  The ferry passengers boarded the cart and rolled uphill in the rain. Ellie shouldered her duffle and squelched after them, turning aside partway up the path, pushing through broken bougainvillea branches that crowded the gravel track leading to her grandmother’s large wooded property. She reached the fence and scrambled up and over with the confidence of a girl who’d spent the last four years conducting eco-tours through the canopy of the Costa Rican rain forest.

  A girl who wasted four years. Ellie kicked a rock irritably. A girl who squandered her grandmother’s retirement fund. She kicked again, caught her foot on a fallen tree branch, flopped forward into the mud, and skidded face-first down the hill. Her duffel bounced and rolled, coming to rest against the trunk of the poisonous manchineel tree at the edge of the beach. Ellie plowed to a stop just out of reach of the tree’s corrosive dripping sap.

  Terrific. She’d have to leave her duffle there until the weather cleared up. Ellie wiped muck from her eyes and trudged uphill, scrambling over broken palm fronds and squishy masses of pulverized purple seagrapes. The storm damage seemed worse on this side of the fence than at the Paradise Resort. Usually Doris sent gardeners over to help clean up, but they probably hadn’t had time to come yet.

  Clack. Wood smacked against wood somewhere nearby. Clack. Ellie climbed into the open space around her grandmother’s house and stared. Instead of the neat island-blue cottage she’d grown up in, Gran’s home had become a faded gray ruin surrounded by broken glass, uprooted garden plants, and splintered porch rails.

  Clack. The front door swung open and shut in the breeze.

  “Gran?” Ellie ran up the porch and into the cottage. “Gran?” Inside the hallway floorboards were wet and swollen, covered with filth. A dead seagull lay, feet up, under a table. “Gran!” Was this why Pete had told her to talk to Doris? Had something happened to Gran? Ellie hurried to her grandmother’s bedroom, terrified of what she might find, but this space at least was clean and dry. She tried to make sense of the four-poster bed, stripped of linen, the faded place on the wall where the picture of Ellie’s dead parents used to hang.

  Ellie backed slowly across the hall to the room she’d grown up in and found the same emptiness: bed stripped, books and personal items gone. The built-in desk that had once housed an elaborate nature collection now contained nothing but her old Paradise Resort gardener’s cap and a white envelope marked Ellie in impersonal block letters.

  Shafts of sunlight hit the window, igniting dust in the air. Outside, a gray kingbird began its toy-whistle call. Ellie clutched the cap like a security blanket and sat on the floor, missing her gran so much she thought her ribcage might shatter.

  At last she gathered courage and ripped open the envelope.

  Elliegator—it was dated a week before the big storm—I’ve been writing regular….
/>   Ellie bit her lip and drew blood. Gran’s alive. For a moment, nothing else mattered.

  I’ve been writing regular, but only got a couple of postcards from you this year.

  That was because Ellie’s professor, Juan Esteban, had been stealing her mail. Her mail, her dreams, her tuition money…. She forced herself to keep reading.

  So I don’t know if you got my letter asking you to come home. The Andersens offered me a pile of money for the cottage this summer, so I finally sold and moved out. Doris next door has your stuff in storage and a plane ticket for you to join me in Vegas.

  Vegas? Ellie reread the words. Las Vegas? Gran?

  I’m worried about you, sweetie. Nobody at the University of Costa Rica seems to know who you are. Doris found a private detective, and thank goodness now I’ve got money to pay him. I’m waiting two weeks and if that doesn’t work, I’ll come get you myself!

  Call the instant you get this or sooner.

  Love, Gran.

  Ellie pulled the gardener’s cap onto her head, feeling lost, feeling terrible about making Gran worry. But Las Vegas? Why? Why would Gran sell her home? Because I spent her retirement money on a fake college degree. But Gran hadn’t known it was fake. Ellie hadn’t known herself until three months ago. And even without a degree, Gran knew Ellie would look after her. She and Ellie had always been a team, from the day three-year-old Ellie’s parents had run their sailboat onto a reef and drowned until the afternoon she boarded a plane, intending to save the environment.

  Ellie stuffed the letter in her pocket and wandered numbly through the house, noticing more signs of the move—the missing books and knickknacks, the teak wheel salvaged from her parents’ boat gone.

  Gran’s gone. Her childhood home was an empty shell. She stood in the open front door and stared five miles east across the waters of Pillsbury Sound at the muted hills of St. Thomas. Dull waves washed the beach below, carrying rotting storm debris with every fresh swell. Gone to Vegas. It didn’t seem possible. She picked up a splintered piece of wood and tried to fit it into a gap in the porch railing.

  “Honestly, Ryan,” a female whine split the air. “I don’t see why we’re walking in mud.”

  “Because the path from the Paradise Resort is muddy,” a man replied, “and we’re walking on it.”

  Ryan. Ellie’s heart stopped, skipped a beat, and started again. Ryan Andersen. They hadn’t met in fourteen years, but she still knew his voice. At age eight, Ellie had had the most violent crush on teen Ryan, stalking him and his cousin Chris mercilessly around the resort. She’d even staged an imaginary wedding, which had gone horribly, embarrassingly wrong.

  She couldn’t face Ryan Andersen. Not covered head-to-toe in mud.

  Ellie turned and raced through the house to her bedroom, forced up the swollen window sash, yanked out the screen, and plunged through. She tiptoed along the building and peeked around the corner in time to see two hulking men in mirrored sunglasses emerge from the trees. Behind them strolled Ryan, arm-in-arm with a fashionable female Ellie didn’t know but immediately hated. Behind Ryan were two older, more elegant men—she cringed, recognizing Ryan’s father and his Uncle Henrik—followed by a third professional bodyguard type with a blond ponytail.

  This is bad. Ellie ducked behind the house. This was awful. She was in no fit state to be seen by anyone, let alone Ryan and his upper-crust family. Carefully keeping Gran’s house between her and the newcomers, she left the clearing that surrounded the cottage and climbed the muddy hill into the trees. There was a public road running along the top of Gran’s property that she could use to hike to the Paradise Resort. Doris would let her clean up and call Gran….

  “All right, we’ve seen it. Great,” Ryan’s dad rumbled below her. “How soon are you going to get to work bulldozing this eyesore?”

  Ellie stopped to listen beneath a damp and fragrant bay tree.

  “Two days,” Ryan said. “Demo and site prep are good to go. Everything’s on schedule to break ground for Casino Paradise on September fifteenth.”

  A drop of water hit Ellie’s neck and slithered downward.

  “It better be,” Ryan’s dad replied. “Because your trust reverts to me at one minute past midnight the next day.”

  They’re building a casino? Ellie squeezed between branches. That can’t be right. St. John was sixty-percent national forest. It didn’t have large-scale development.

  “We all agreed to the September deadline,” Ryan said. “Everything’s under control.”

  Ellie pulled her cap low and crept closer. St. John—with its wooded hillsides, white-sand beaches, and pristine coral reefs—was one of the loveliest places in the Caribbean, and of all the spots on St. John, her grandmother’s property overlooking Paradise Bay was the best. Ellie had catalogued over one hundred and fifty species of plants and animals living within its boundaries at one time or another, including a leatherback turtle nesting site.

  There was only one way Ryan Andersen would ever bulldoze Gran’s cottage and build a casino.

  Over Ellie’s dead body.

  Chapter Two

  As a child, Ryan had never been happier than when he was on St. John. Together with his cousin Chris, he’d hiked rugged national forests, surfed winter swells in Reef Bay, explored coral beds, and cooked fresh-caught fish on the beach. He’d even enjoyed helping his Aunt Doris do chores around the Paradise Resort, although Ryan’s father’s home was stocked to its snooty eyebrows with servants. He’d loved the sun and rain, stars and sea, canned soup and fig bananas that had been pilfered from island trees.

  Which goes to show. Ryan came to a stop, supporting his clinging companion. It isn’t where you are but who you’re with that matters. Ahead, his father’s bodyguards raised binoculars and scanned the property for imaginary threats. Bekka’s high-heeled boots sank into the mud and, for the eighteenth time, Ryan hauled her out. Sweat trickled beneath his rain-damp polo shirt in the August heat.

  “For heaven’s sake, boy, stand up straight.” Ryan’s father, Carl Andersen, strode past and scowled at the house. Behind him, Ryan’s Uncle Henrik took out a pocket handkerchief and polished humidity off of round wireframe glasses.

  Three months ago when Ryan was negotiating for the property, the house had been a typical island cottage, neatly kept, if in chronic need of repair. Now the porch railing was shattered, deposited in sections around ruined gardens, the front windows smashed in. Ryan hoped Gigi Green had gotten everything she wanted out of the place before she left for Las Vegas.

  A third bodyguard, Ryan’s assistant Lucas, joined the group. The first two men separated and stalked into the trees like imitation commandos on their first cereal boxtop adventure.

  “So you finally pried the old biddy off her land.” Ryan’s father squinted into the bushes. “Where’d you stash her body?”

  “Honestly, Carl.” Henrik frowned. “Show some respect.”

  “No stashing.” Ryan passed Bekka to Lucas and accepted a messenger bag in return. “And no bodies. I simply offered Mrs. Green a fair deal and she took it.”

  “I’ve offered that woman plenty of fair deals. She never took them before.”

  “Ah. But your deals didn’t include the use of a suite at Hotel Ten Las Vegas.”

  “They certainly did not. That place is an embarrassment.”

  Ryan shrugged, declining the invitation to bicker. Hotel Ten—Tenochtitlan, before it became clear nobody who’d had two drinks could remember where they were staying—had previously been Ryan’s most ambitious business venture. Aztec themed, draped in gardens, and covered with hand-carved stone, the construction overruns had nearly ruined him, although the hotel became profitable once the irrigation problems were solved.

  Once I no longer had anything to do with it. Ryan sighed inwardly. He’d bred champion racehorses, mined opals, invested in cutting-edge medical technology, and produced a top-rated internet reality series—each of which hit it big immediately after he lost interest and moved on. Ryan’
s own finances had suffered so dramatically, he’d had to let his father and Uncle Henrik take control of his fortune, reducing Ryan to a life of quarterly allowances, family credit cards, and transportation scrounged on cousins’ private jets.

  “Now, Carl-ums,” Bekka minced forward and caught the arm of the man she intended to make her father-in-law. “Don’t be cranky. Mrs. Green wouldn’t budge until Ryan got the idea to bet Villa Louisa on the toss of a coin. Turned out the old lady liked being a high-roller.”

  “I think she liked getting away from tropical storms.” Ryan wished Bekka would keep quiet. Villa Louisa, a large shambling property situated on St. Thomas almost directly across the water from the Paradise Resort, had been left to Ryan by his late mom. He had every right to wager the place, but the father who currently held Ryan’s wealth in trust might disagree. They were up against a deadline, here. Ryan had to break ground on Casino Paradise by his thirtieth birthday—September fifteenth—or else forfeit his fortune forever.

  “Right.” Ryan took out his tablet computer. “Let me show you where things stand.” He led the group through the debris-filled clearing to the cottage. “The survey company set up wireless markers last week.” He tapped buttons to load the architect’s model. There was a pause while the tablet’s GPS synced with markers, and then a 3D building, perfectly matched to the actual landscape, began to form on the screen. Casino Paradise would be clean and modern, covered in windows, crowned with an elaborate rooftop garden. A state-of-the-art pier, running far out over the coral reef, included valet boat parking for guests.

  “All those trees on top will make a mess in the outdoor restaurant,” Carl Andersen commented. “And we planned eighteen stories, not fifteen. Fifteen won’t provide a fast enough return on investment.”

  “The property’s intended for long term profits, not fast.” Ryan knew perfectly well his father had read the reports. “And the trees will be great.”