The pretend fiance fiasc.., p.1
The Pretend Fiancé Fiasco (Copper Valley Bro Code Book 6), page 1
THE PRETEND FIANCÉ FIASCO
PIPPA GRANT
Copyright © 2025
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever, including the training of artificial intelligence, without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All text in this book was generated by Pippa Grant without use of artificial intelligence.
Pippa Grant®, Copper Valley Fireballs®, and Copper Valley Thrusters® are registered trademarks of Bang Laugh Love LLC.
Editing by Jessica Snyder, HEA Author Services
Proofreading by Emily Laughridge & Jodi Duggan
Cover Design by Qamber Designs
Cover Image Copyright © Wander Aguiar
CONTENTS
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Sneak Peek of The Last Eligible Billionaire
Pippa Grant Book List
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
The Pretend Fiancé Fiasco
A Mysterious Protective Hero / Fake Relationship / Forced Proximity / Falling-For-My-Crush / Treasure Hunt Romantic Comedy
It started as a joke. After a string of bad boyfriends, I made up a fake boyfriend so people would quit asking when I was going to meet a grumpy lumberjack trying to save his mama’s inn in my adopted hometown.
When my grandma demanded proof from afar, I sent her a picture of me and my “boyfriend.”
Spoiler alert: He wasn’t really my boyfriend.
He was actually a reclusive former boy band member who swings through town sometimes and is friends with my friends.
As much as a reclusive former boy bander can be friends with anyone, that is.
He doesn’t know I told anyone he’s my boyfriend. Or that his name is Steve.
So when Grandma sends the guy she’d rather me marry to town to make sure “Steve” is good enough for me—and to talk me into marrying him instead—I have something of a problem.
But I got myself into this mess, so I’ll get myself out.
By proposing.
Relax, relax, I’m proposing a fake wedding.
And when he turns me down, I can say we broke up.
Except he doesn’t turn me down.
Instead, he offers me a trade.
He’ll pretend to be my groom, but I have to do something for him in return.
And that something?
Hoooo, boy.
I liked the man better when he was my pretend boyfriend Steve.
The Pretend Fiancé Fiasco is an action-packed romcom featuring the reclusive final member of the boy band Bro Code, a recovering good girl with too many men interested in her for all the wrong reasons, a treasure hunt, a fake engagement, and the best surprise to hit the Copper Valley universe since the Fireballs’ new mascot was revealed. This small town romcom stands alone, but you wouldn’t go wrong to read both the Copper Valley Bro Code and Copper Valley Fireballs series, along with Dirty Talking Rival, to catch all of the easter eggs.
PROLOGUE
The Daily Gossip
By a special anonymous columnist for the Blue Lagoon Gazette
By now, you undoubtedly know that Cooper Rock, baseball player with buns of steel, is marrying Waverly Sweet, his pop star girlfriend, in the little mountain town of Shipwreck this weekend.
We’re not here to talk about who’s acting as her maid of honor or what they’re serving for dinner or how the local sheriff’s department will handle shutting the town down with the number of celebrities and athletes destined for the goofball pirate-themed town though.
Oh, no.
We’re talking about what really matters.
The treasure.
You want to know what Waverly’s colors are or how Cooper’s spending his last days of bachelorhood, look somewhere else.
I’m here to give you the real scoop.
To do that, we have to go back in time over two hundred years, to the end of the eighteenth century, when legendary pirate Thorny Rock escaped capture by loading his treasure up in a covered wagon and heading inland from the port of Norfolk.
“Yes, the story I’ve been told since I was little is that Thorny Rock evaded arrest by hustling inland,” Tillie Jean Rock-Cole, Shipwreck’s newly-installed mayor and Cooper’s sister, told me. “My bedtime stories were about his pirate days and how he settled into life here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My grandpa insisted Thorny buried his treasure somewhere out here, but to the best of my knowledge, if it’s real, it’s never been found.”
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The biggest part of the story about Waverly Sweet marrying Cooper Rock is that they’re getting hitched in a town where his great-great-something-grandfather, the legendary Thorny Rock himself, buried a pirate treasure.
His family has been hosting Shipwreck’s annual Pirate Festival for longer than this author has been alive, but have they been hiding secrets?
Yes, yes, they donated nearly all of the artifacts now on display at the new Thorny Rock Museum in downtown Shipwreck, but did they donate everything they had?
According to residents of Sarcasm, a town just up the road from Shipwreck, it’s likely the Rock family isn’t fully forthcoming when they talk about their pirate ancestor.
I spoke with one resident who requested anonymity because of the supposed truce between the two rival towns, prompted when Cooper’s brother, Grady, married a Sarcasm native a few years back. My source said tensions between Shipwreck and Sarcasm remain high, and only partially because of the trash talk about who has the better festival.
“They talk about how they’re the best pirate town in the world, but they never mention that Sarcasm was founded by Thorny Rock’s cousin, who did the pirating with him,” my source said. “We’ve always thought they’re hiding more than anyone at their festival suspects. That’s why we started the Unicorn Festival. Because we knew unicorns were the only things that could be more popular than pirates, and we wanted to show them we’re not always last.”
Pirates and unicorns aside, there’s one occasional Shipwreck resident who believes the treasure is still out there.
“Ah, heck, yeah,” Beck Ryder, former member of the boy band Bro Code who has a weekend house just above the town proper, said when I caught up with him at Grady Rock’s bakery. “Of course I believe the treasure’s still out there. How cool would it be to find a treasure? That’s like, next level goals for an amazing life, you know? I want to believe in it. I want to believe my wife and kids and I will find it one day.”
Ryder says he’s been friends with the Rock family for at least a decade, and that Shipwreck is one of his favorite places in the world. His sister is rumored to have fallen in love with her husband while she was in Shipwreck to attend a destination wedding.
That same destination wedding, by the way, is the reason there are wild goats all over town.
Naturally, Shipwreck residents blame Sarcasm residents for nearly ruining their reputation as the place for pirate-themed destination weddings by releasing a herd of goats during the ceremony, and naturally, Sarcasm residents deny it.
One thing that can’t be denied?
Shipwreck is also a town of love.
Beck Ryder added that one of his former bandmates, Cash Rivers, fell in love with his girlfriend, Waverly Sweet’s BFF, the pop star known as Aspen, here in Shipwreck too.
“Oh, yeah, and you know the Wilson brothers are here all the time, between Levi being tight with Waverly and Tripp owning Cooper’s team,” Ryder continued, referencing two more of his four former bandmates. “It’s the best date night when all of us are out here together.”
I asked him if Davis Remington, the last former member of Bro Code, ever visited with a lady love as well, and Beck’s answer convinced me that he was lying about his knowledge of the treasure.
“Davis Remington? Who’s that?”
On point for the men who protect their last band member’s privacy, but suspicious when paired with his claims that he hopes to one day find a treasure.
A treasure that Tillie Je
This author attempted to get a quote from Pop Rock—patriarch of the town and grandfather to Tillie Jean, Cooper, and Grady—but both he and his occasionally-obscene pet parrot, Long Beak Silver, declined to shed any more light on the subject for us.
One thing is certain—if the treasure is still out there, it will be found.
Probably soon.
Because this reporter isn’t the only one covering the history of Shipwreck. And the town has the increased tourism to show for it.
“Oh, yes, we have more and more people stopping in every day to ask if we have any secret intel on where the treasure might be,” Sloane Pearce, a volunteer at the Thorny Rock Museum, told me. “Ever since Cooper and Waverly announced they were getting married here, we’ve been slammed. Tourism is up three or four times what it usually is this time of year. People want to find a treasure.”
When pressed on if she thought it could be found, she simply smiled. “I guess that depends on if it exists.”
Whether it does or not, one thing is certain: this wedding and all of its consequences will be one more story for the Rock family to tell its family for ages to come.
1
Sloane Pearce, aka a woman with just a couple secrets who’s mistaken if she thinks glitter is her biggest worry today
If you’d told me when I was thirteen years old that I’d have one of the most important jobs at the wedding of the century, I would’ve told you good girls don’t go in places where jobs like this are required.
I like being thirty-five so much more than I liked being thirteen.
It’s way more fun.
“Hand over the glitter bombs, gentlemen, and do not make me get specific about what constitutes a glitter bomb,” I say to the twin behemoths that I’ve just cornered near the makeshift stage in the Shipwreck, Virginia town square where Cooper Rock, local hero—don’t tell him I called him that—has just exchanged wedding vows with pop princess Waverly Sweet.
The two men I’m talking to played professional hockey a few years ago down the road in Copper Valley, and if anyone’s going to defy Shipwreck’s glitter ban, it’s them.
Or any one of Cooper’s baseball-playing teammates.
Actually, possibly Waverly. There was an unholy amount of glitter involved in the proposal that led to this wedding, and for once, that glitter wasn’t Cooper’s fault. Directly, anyway.
A few of the locals too. They’re sneaky enough to sprinkle glitter and successfully blame it on someone else.
The twins share a look.
“We don’t have glitter bombs, do we?” one says.
The other grunts an agreement.
I have to suck in a smile. They’re so bad at lying, it’s hilarious. “Look, I love a good glitter bomb as much as the next person, but you can’t launch them with this much security in town today.” On top of half of the professional baseball players in the country and a solid number of professional athletes from other sports being here, there are also a ton of music industry people that I can’t name and a not-insignificant portion of Hollywood that I do recognize and can name. There are enough important people that the town’s been closed since last night. Nobody in, nobody out, without passing a thorough ID check at the roadblocks on either end of town. Wedding guests only.
I try to look sternly at the twins, which is hella difficult. “Imagine you launched a glitter bomb and a piece of glitter got caught in Liv Daniels’s eye and she had to back out of her next movie because she was recovering from surgery to try to save it.”
The slightly larger twin lights up. “Would she have to wear a pirate eye patch in the movie? That would be cool.”
The other twin grunts again, I assume in agreement.
So I resort to desperate measures. “I have both of your wives’ numbers in my phone.”
They share a look, and I’m soon holding an armful of homemade glitter bombs.
Like, a full freaking armful.
I don’t know how they were hiding these in their suit pockets. There have to be almost a dozen of these things, all the paper towel tube variety.
I should’ve picked a dress with pockets.
That would’ve been more helpful for my job today. Or a large purse. I don’t even have room for a phone, much less this many glitter bombs.
“Are you so for real right now?” Tillie Jean Cole, sister of the groom and new mayor of Shipwreck—and also the person who put the glitter bomb ban into effect, which, yes, is Cooper’s fault—stops beside us and watches as the quieter of the two twins reaches into his pants and pulls out one more glitter bomb to add to the pile.
I don’t want to know what that glitter bomb was touching.
I truly don’t.
“They are definitely so for real right now,” I tell my friend. “How are you surprised by this?”
She’s clearly suppressing a smile too. “You guys. You know how to break into Cooper’s house, and you brought glitter bombs to the wedding instead?”
Once again, the twins share a look.
This one suggests there are, in fact, already other glitter bombs hidden at Cooper’s house.
The slightly larger twin clears his throat. “I need to go help my lady with the kids.”
The other nods. “Yep.”
They turn and disappear into the crowd, which is freaking impressive considering their size.
Tillie Jean grins at me. “Did you count how many there are?”
“You may not have any of these for private use.” Oh yes, I know exactly where her mind is going. Will Sloane notice if one disappears?
Tillie Jean has been one of my best friends since I moved here about six years ago after another wedding that was epic in its own way, even if the memory of why I was here for that one always makes me feel a little awkward. “You already tell people you had to explain to your obstetrician why your daughter was born glittered. I’m not enabling you to break your own ban.”
Her blue eyes twinkle in the dwindling sunlight. “You’re remarkably not fun today.”
“You can think I’m not fun all you want, but I’m having the time of my life. Do you know how many famous people I’ve gotten to shake down? I will never—ever—have this opportunity again in my entire life. I’m living up being the glitter po-po today.”
“Are you asking for their autographs while you do it?”
“I would be if this dress had pockets.” I pat my hips where pockets belong. “Why does my dress not have pockets?”
“Waverly’s dress has pockets.”
“I know. I’m jealous.”
“Honestly? Me too. I forgot pockets too. You’d think being a mom would’ve made me insist on pockets for this thing, but nope.” She fluffs her green bridesmaid dress and grins at me. “Would’ve been good for food too. Keep up the good work, and make sure you eat, okay?”
