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"W hat did he say?"

Kenneth sounded more anxious than I had ever heard him sound. I could hear his cane hitting the gravel and his feet shuffling towards where I stood.I waited until my grandfather stepped in front of me to respond. His posture immediately buckled as soon as Nolan's car was out of sight. He staggered to the closest support structure, the courtyard wall. Not me. Never me. His attempts at displaying virality had barely worked. Nolan could see through my grandfather, but he was too stubborn to realize it. He could barely walk without at least a cane. What he truly needed was a walker, but good luck raising that idea to him.

He clung to the wall, almost falling, and subsequently recovered.

"He wanted to know if I was consenting."

Grandfather scoffed. A cough followed. "Weak man. Obsessed with trivialities." he coughed again. "You can see it in the way he runs his business—" He coughed again. His entire body heaving. The black pinstriped suit he wore ballooning as he bowled over. I rushed over to help him up, but he swatted my hands away. Large globs of phlegm came out of his mouth and flew onto the gravel. He straightened, turned back towards the house and I strolled behind him, my hands hovering around him in case he stumbled again. "You can see the way he runs his business," he continued as though nothing had happened. "He's a pitiful replacement for his father."

Given that his company was about to fail, it was quite ironic. Hawthorne's rapid growth and high profits were evident, even to someone as business-na?ve as myself. Meanwhile, debt and layoffs overwhelmed W. Burgess.

Every business article I had read during my little googling of him had praised Nolan Hawthorne's business acumen and how he turned around what was once a failing family business into a dominant force.

"It's going to be interesting," Grandfather coughed again, "to see how he will react when he finally gets what he deserves. I will never forgive that man for…" he trailed off when he realized he had been referring to the other Nolan. The current Nolan's father. A man who died a few years ago. "Anyway," he began again, "did he suspect anything?"

"If he did, he didn't show it." Nolan had scanned me up and down with his microscopic gaze. Undressing me with those gray eyes. His gaze wouldn't have seemed unsettling were he less attractive. I knew he was hot. I had seen an image of him, but the raw masculinity he exuded in real life surprised me. My whole body reacted to his presence as if meeting a man for the very first time.

"Ha! Idiot. I told you it was going to work. A simple nose job and now you two look almost identical.

Subconsciously, my hand reached my nose. I've had it for nine weeks now, but it still felt like a foreign limb, despite simple cartilage removal. "But what if she comes back?"

He whipped around to face me. This was the first time I had said the thought aloud. Pretending to be Aelin, someone who didn't know what we were doing, was bound to backfire. We had gone too far. Deceiving Nolan hadn't been pleasant. I was sick to my stomach, stumbling over my thoughts as I tried to pretend to be someone more interesting than me. If Aelin were ever to find out, she would kill me.

Grandfather dismissed my concerns. "I'll worry about that. And besides. Aelin would be happy to find out she got married to a billionaire."

But it wouldn't be her who would get married. It would be me. Her name would be on the marriage certificate. "What about me?"

"What else do you want? You'll get more than you could ever imagine!" he gasped as we entered the house. His bodyguard hovered at the entrance. He waved over two nurses who came running with a wheelchair. Grandfather swatted them away when they tried to place him in the chair; however, his inability to hold himself up steadily forced him to ungraciously accept the wheelchair. The two nurses wheeled him away to his bedroom, ignoring the multiple slurs he hurled their way.His bodyguard lingered behind them. A chill ran down my spine. I’ve always found my grandfather’s man unnerving. His steely silence combined with his size made him scary, but I guess that was the point.

I climbed the grand staircase and proceeded to my bedroom. It was close to dinnertime, but food was the last thing on my mind. I was screwed. My chest tightened at the mere thought of what I had put myself in. When grandfather first came up with the idea, I thought he was joking. Learning how much I would be paid to impersonate someone else made it seem like a good idea. If only that's what all of this was about. The more I learned about his plan, the more I realized his scheme was bigger than pretending to be my cousin at a party. At a gala. He wanted more. And by that point, he had more leverage over me than mere finances. By the time he asked me to pretend to be my cousin so I can marry some stranger, he knew I would not say no.

I was fucked. Deeply fucking fucked.