Lori is a lawyer who works with a company called Alliance. Alliance specializes in bringing together people who are looking for a temporary marriage with people who are willing to agree to being married for a few years in return for being well-paid. For example, Paul Wentworth. He was running for governor in California but as a single man, he wasn't polling well. Thanks to Alliance, who found Shannon Redding, a respectable woman willing to be his wife for a few years in exchange for a nice house and several million dollars in her bank account, Paul won the election to become governor.
Anyway, that how it usually worked. But Shannon fell in love with Paul and wanted to be his forever wife. Paul was not interested and they were divorced, as originally planned. Shannon never got over him.
It also didn't work out that way for Trina and Fedor Petrov. Fedor killed himself before the arranged marriage was scheduled to end and Trina inherited from his mother what should have been his fortune of over $300,000,000. And Fedor's father, a nasty piece of work, is not happy about being cut out of his ex-wife's fortune and is not above extortion, intimidation, and brutality to get his hands on the money.
And there is Avery, whose divorce ended exactly as planned, with both parties happy. Until the paparazzi snapped a photo of her celebrating her divorce at party featuring a male stripper.
Avery is pretty unfazed by the publicity, though. Still Lori includes Avery along with Trina and Shannon as Alliance's guests on a cruise to Europe, hoping it helps the three women adjust to their new circumstances better.
All the women seem to be having a good time on the cruise and even Lori makes a bit of a love connection with an attractive man, Reed, who appears to be just as attracted to her as she is to him. What she doesn't know is that Reed has deliberately targeted Lori and is being paid to discover everything he can about her. What wasn't in his job description was falling hard for the woman he is being paid to get close to.
This was a pretty good story. The best part was the cruise. But the three women are soon back on solid ground and Lori runs afoul of Trina's ex-father-in-law, Ruslan. Angry at losing his chance at his ex-wife's fortune, he makes violent threats at Lori. And the tone of the whole story just got a bit too grim, kind of took the fun away from it. The first part of the story was much more fun and enjoyable than the other part, where Ruslan is threatening to kill Lori in his attempts to get access to his ex-daughter-in-law, Trina.
This is the first book in Bybee's First Wives series.
Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.
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