Cut the Crap

ROMY'S POV

I didn't sleep at all that night. I lay awake staring at the photo until three in the morning, and then I deleted it, and then I wished I hadn't.

Paloma had to be behind it. She had laughed too hard when I said Brice didn't show up, and she had wanted that lipstick far too badly.

So at ten the next morning, I took a taxi to Bel Air.

The Pembroke Residence wasn't a house you could see from the road. There was a black iron gate, a long wall covered in ivy and a guardhouse with two men in dark suits who watched the taxi pull up without blinking.

I rolled down the window. "Hi. I'm here to see Mr. Pembroke."

"Name?"

"Romilly Ashcombe."

The guard checked his tablet, and then he checked it again. "You're not on the list."

"I know, but I was told to come in three days, and I need to speak to him today. It's important."

"Ma'am, nobody gets through this gate without clearance."

"Can you call him? Please. Tell him it's the woman from the courthouse."

The guards looked at each other, and something in their faces told me they had heard a lot of women say a lot of things at this gate.

"Ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

The taxi driver was already sighing. I was reaching for my purse when a black car came up the drive behind us and stopped.

The back window slid down.

It was him. In daylight he was somehow more intimidating, all sharp lines and dark eyes, and he looked at me through the window with no surprise at all.

"Eager already?" he said. "You couldn't even wait three days to move into my house?"

"That's not why I'm here."

"Get in."

I paid the taxi driver, who looked relieved to see me go, and climbed into the back seat beside him. The car smelled of leather and something expensive. He sat on the far side of the seat with his phone in his hand and didn't look at me while the gate swung open.

"Mr. Pembroke," I said. "Sir. I need to tell you something, and I need you to let me finish."

He kept scrolling.

"I'm not the woman you were supposed to marry. I was waiting at the courthouse for someone else. His name is Brice Tolliver, and he never showed up, and you grabbed my wrist before I could.."

He laughed, low and short.

"Cut the crap."

"I'm serious."

"So was my grandmother, for six months." Finally he looked at me, and I wished he hadn't. "You signed the paper. You took the card. And now you're at my gate a day after the wedding, telling me it was all a mistake. Do you think I haven't seen this before?"

"Seen what?"

"A woman negotiating." He turned back to his phone. "Whatever you want, put it in writing and give it to Hollis."

"I don't want anything from you."

"Everyone wants something from me, Mrs. Pembroke. The ones who say they don't just want more."

"That's not my name."

"It is now." He didn't look up. "You made sure of that yesterday."

The car stopped in front of a white stone house so large that I couldn't see where it ended.

A man in a dark suit opened my door before I could reach for the handle, and Evander was already walking up the front steps without waiting for me. Inside, he left me in a living room with a ceiling twice the height of any I had ever stood under. A gray-haired housekeeper who introduced herself as Mrs. Quarles brought me a glass of water, and she studied my face the whole time she set it down. I didn't drink it. Through an open doorway, I could hear him on a call, speaking in short, cold sentences about a board meeting in New York.

My hands were shaking, so I did the only thing I could think of. I stepped into the hallway, where he couldn't hear me, and I called Brice.

If I could get Brice to admit it, if I could get him to say he was the one I was supposed to marry, then this man would have to believe me.

It rang four times. Then, for the first time in two days, he answered.

"Romy." He sounded bored. "Stop calling me."

"Brice, where were you? I waited for two hours. You need to come and explain to.."

"Explain what? Listen. No matter how much you paid, I was never going to marry you."

"What are you talking about? We had a contract."

"We had a joke." He laughed, and somebody laughed with him in the background. "Babe, she wants to know about the contract."

Someone else came closer to the phone, and I knew who it was before she said a word.

"Tell her about the deposit," Paloma said.

"Your deposit?" Brice said. "We used it to buy her a bag."

They were both laughing when I hung up.

I stood in that hallway with the phone against my chest. Five thousand dollars, almost everything I had saved in two years, and my sister had spent it on a bag. There had never been an agency, and there had never been a groom. She had sent me to that courthouse in a white dress so she could watch me get stood up.

And instead, I had married a stranger who thought I was a liar.

"Paloma," I whispered. "How could you?"

"Who's Paloma?"

I spun around.

Evander Pembroke was standing at the end of the hallway with his phone still in his hand. I didn't know how long he had been there.