I walked into my brother’s engagement party. The bride whispered with a sneer, “The stinky country girl is here.”
She didn’t know I owned the hotel, or that the bride’s family was about to learn it the hard way. The moment I walked into that ballroom, I heard her say it.
Sloan Whitmore, my brother’s perfect fiancée, leaning toward her bridesmaids with a glass of champagne in her manicured hand. Her whisper was loud enough to carry across the room, and I know she meant it that way. “Oh, great.
The stinky country girl is here.”
Her friends giggled like a pack of hyenas in designer dresses. Sloan didn’t even bother to look at me when she said it. I was that insignificant to her.
Just some embarrassment that crawled out of a small town to ruin the aesthetic of her perfect engagement party. What Sloan didn’t know, what nobody in that room knew, was that I signed the deed to this hotel three years ago. The Monarch Hotel.
Every chandelier above her head, every piece of silverware she was eating with, every square inch of Italian marble beneath her overpriced heels belonged to me. And by the end of tonight, that whisper was going to cost her everything she ever wanted. My name is Bethany Burns.
I’m thirty-one years old, and I grew up in Milbrook, Pennsylvania, a town so small that the only traffic jam we ever had was when old Mr. Henderson’s cows escaped and blocked Main Street for three hours. I left home when I was eighteen, and I never really looked back.
Not because I hated where I came from, but because my family made it crystal clear there wasn’t room for me there. See, I have an older brother, Garrett, the golden child, the son who could do no wrong. Growing up, everything I did was measured against him.
And I always came up short. If I got an A, Garrett had gotten an A+. If I made the softball team, Garrett had been team captain.
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