Page 1 of Love Contract (Bride of the Billionaire)

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Daisy

I hate Winter Wellington.

What kind of a name is Winter anyway? Sounds like one of those pretentious celebrity names like Apple, Cherry, Blue, or Evening Light or something. Who’s his dad anyway? Tom Cruise?

Winter Wellington, the billionaire playboy, heir to the Wellington Company, the same company that put my old job out of business and landed me on the unemployment line during the worst economy in recent years.

I used to have a steady job at a plant nursery until the Wellington Company opened up what basically amounts to a Walmart for plants right down the street from my old job. Three months later, my boss closed her doors.

And now where am I going? I’m driving to Winter’s fricking mansion to plant some fricking flowers in his fricking garden.

Frick.

But what else am I supposed to do? Starve? It’s not like I can rely on my father to take care of me; I never knew the man. He ran off on my mom when he found out she was pregnant. Mom was around…technically, but spends more time with random men she meets on her dating apps—plural—than she does with me. And when she’s home, all she does is point out all the ways that I’m prettier than she is. Do you know what it’s like to have a mom who resents you for simply being alive?

“Just seduce him!” Abby’s voice crackles out of the speaker on my phone. “Throw him that sweet Daisy flower of yours and take half of his billions.”

“Ew, Daisy flower!?” I laugh as I pull onto Winter’s private road. Yes, he owns a fricking road. “Come on, Abby. I’m not going to lose my virginity to Winter Wellington.”

“You’re not going to lose it ever if you don’t shape up,” she replies. “Or is it your goal to go through life being a nun without the habit?”

“It’s my goal to find a man I want to sleep with. Not just any man.”

I pull up to the locked gate and glance at the clock on my phone. It’s almost noon. I’m late. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t tell me to turn around and go home. I’m looking around for some way to buzz myself in when the gate swings open.

“Here we go,” I say to myself and to Abby as I pull through.

“I gotta go,” Abby says. “We’re having a big bachelor party come in tonight and I have to prepare.”

“Get those tips,” I laugh. “I’ll come see you at work later.”

“Not if you’re wrapped up in Winter’s arms with his pee-pee inside you, you won’t!”

Abby cackles like the witch she is, and I try not to let her hear me laugh as I hang up the phone. Abby and I are nothing alike: she’s confident, totally comfortable with her sexuality, goes through guys like I go through pints of Ben and Jerry, but is also the greatest friend in the world.

She was the one who told Shawn, my serial-killer-wannabe boyfriend, that if he ever came near our apartment again, she would go all “Hannibal Lecter on his ass.” I really wish I had her with me as I pull up the drive and Winter’s home comes into view.

“Wow…”

I don’t care if I hate him; it’s impossible to not be impressed by the enormous mansion that looks like something out of Pride and Prejudice. It’s not modern, like something you’d see in Beverly Hills, but like an old English manor but brand new. My car is a hunk of junk, but feels even junkier as I pull up and park at the front steps.