One Night With The Wrong Brother

Katherine Woodward loved Arthur Riddle for years. Four years ago, at a Hamptons yacht party, she was drugged and slept with a man she thought was Arthur. She woke beside his younger brother, Augustus "Gus" Riddle. He called her a messy mistake and wrote a check to buy her silence. She tore it up in his face. He drove off in the rain, splashing mud on her.

Four years later, Katherine is a broke extra in Los Angeles, working at a coffee shop and chasing an acting dream. Her roommate Kylie Barker, an Instagram influencer, drags her to a restaurant where Gus walks in. He publicly calls her a commodity that can be bought with money, tells her the market is no longer buying what she is selling. Katherine slips out the side door and walks to the bus stop rather than spend eighty-five dollars on a ride.

Gus's Escalade pulls up outside her building. He shields Kylie with an umbrella, his own shoulder soaked, and Katherine watches from behind a hedge, believing he loves Kylie. Then she slips on the wet pavement and her purse spills open. Inside is a plastic baggy holding the torn pieces of the check from four years ago, taped back together. Gus returns, sees it, and starts to get out. "You actually kept it," he says. She tells him not to touch her. The next morning, Gus sends breakfast and an imported clinical ointment for her knee. Kylie says he personally specified it for Katherine. Katherine decides to move out.

What Katherine does not know: Gus was the man that night. He has loved her ever since. He wrote to her under Arthur's name, paid her rent, arranged her auditions, and paid a roommate to watch over her. Kylie schemes to destroy her. Katherine exposes the plot with a cracked smartwatch and a hidden recording, and walks away with her dignity intact. Gus only wants her more.