How To Propose Accidentally: How To Propose Accidentally, #1

By Layla Valentine

I'll lie to her, I'll use her, and I'll… marry her?!
Sure, the proposal was accidental
But once I make her mine, can I really bring myself to let her go?

I'm a business titan, a legend around New York City, and I always get what I want.

With my latest venture – mining priceless lithium out of the ground - I'm bound to make a killing. But there's a catch: the curmudgeonly owner of the land won't budge and refuses to sell to me, no matter what I offer, and no matter what underhanded schemes I think of.

That is, until I learned this man has a hot-as-all-hell daughter, and she's the perfect person to help me get what I want—the land, the mine, and hell, maybe I can have some fun along the way.

I offered her the job of a lifetime at my company, turned on the charm, and made her want me. She'll be putty in my hands.

The snag in my plan was finding myself on one knee, with a ring in my hand. I sure didn't expect to end up accidentally proposing to her, but what if this is the sweetener my scheme needs?

After all the lies, deceit, the manipulation, will she accept my offer? Or scorn me, and dash the only hope I had at my dream business deal?

And what if… what if this all goes badly wrong?

What if I fall in love with her?

This is the first book in the How To Propose Accidentally series of billionaire romance novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Layla Valentine
• Release date: May 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201578954

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

OLIVER

Istared at the graphs on the poster boards in front of me, trying desperately to keep my mind on what my assistant, Addie, was trying to tell me. Trying to follow along with her lecture—though it was sounding more and more like something one of my professors at NYU would have talked about during a class.

A class that I might well have tried to sleep right through.

Look, geology had never been my thing. And that made it the most bizarre thing possible for Addie to be talking to me about.

Though, I’d also been in a funk for the last six months. Bored out of my freaking mind. And not really paying that much attention to anything.

I couldn’t blame Addie for trying to find something that would bring me out of it. Not really. And she wasn’t that far off base, to be honest. Mining was in my blood.

Well, not my blood, specifically. My family’s. I had ancestors who had come over from Ireland and walked right into the copper mines in New York, and then gone into the holes in the ground again and again and again to support their families over two hundred or so years. So when Addie first suggested it as a possible route for my company, Smithfield Corp, it had definitely touched a nerve.

More than that, honestly. I was a big believer in family. A big believer in tradition. The idea of doing something that my ancestors had also done…

It felt right, somehow. Like something coming full circle. Like something coming home to roost. I’d taken to the idea right away—though I had also forgotten about it right away, as I usually did when I wasn’t personally involved in something. She’d said she’d look into it and we’d left it at that.

Now, it seemed, she had something to report. Something big, if the look on her face was anything to go by.

The problem was, right now, I was also bored with her lecture. The poster boards. The graphs. Because my brain had grabbed hold of what she was saying and started doing what it usually did: presenting me with options. Giving me all the possibilities, and doing it in a way that felt more like an avalanche than a gentle trickle. Giving me ideas for integrating into the local culture. Ideas for other companies. Ideas for sales routes.

But, most of all, telling me that this was something I absolutely had to do. Because like I said, that mining thing? It was in my blood. And as an only child—an only child who had been brought up on the wealthy side of New York, and who had lost his mother far too young—the idea that I could bring things full circle and take us right back to where my ancestors had started…

Well, it was too perfect not to take it up. Yeah, I’d make a ton of money. Grow the company by leaps and bounds. Get us into a whole new realm of investing.

But it was the family aspect that was going to drive me. I already knew it.

And it was that family aspect that finally brought me out of my ennui and got me involved in the conversation.

And you’ve had the area tested already? I asked, breaking into her monologue. You’ve already confirmed that there’s a good chance of actually getting something out of the ground?

She nodded, and I saw the start of a triumphant smile at the corner of her mouth. She’d grabbed my attention—and if I knew Addie the way I thought I knew her, I suspected that there had been an office bet about this. And that she’d just won a tidy sum.

I’ve had the soil tested and retested, she confirmed. And not just the soil. The rocks, too. There’s loads of pegmatite just laying around the place, and that’s what you mine lithium from. The area itself is perfect for it, as well. Briny water. Stagnant water. It builds the ideal environment for this sort of thing. This area worked for copper mining in the late 19 th century, and it’ll work for lithium mining now, for the same exact reasons.

And we’ll be able to access it? I asked quickly. Get machinery up there, have trucks running up and down to collect the material and take it back to where there will be factories to strip it out of whatever rock it comes in?

No, it wasn’t a sophisticated question. But I wasn’t bothering with sophistication. I didn’t need to know how it worked, or the name of the process. I didn’t need to know the names of the rocks or how exactly we were going to get lithium out of them.

That was why I hired experts. People who knew that sort of stuff like the backs of their hands.

Me, I was the money guy. The guy who owned the company and gave the approvals. Thought up the big ideas and got them into production. Made sure the organization did what it needed to do. Made sure we had the resources available to keep business moving forward. I was all big-picture, and left the details to the people under my employ.

"There are already a few structures up there, and there’s a logging road that’s been in heavy