Chapter 6

Skylar's POV

"You're late."

I stopped in the doorway of his office, one hand still on the handle, and stared at him.

He didn't look up from whatever document he was reading. Just let the words sit there between us, casual and unbothered, as though he hadn't spent yesterday drugged at an auction, then married me in a government office, then sent me home in one of his cars like a package that had been delivered to the wrong address.

"I'm sorry?" I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. "Zane. We got married yesterday."

"Contract marriage." He turned a page. "Which means Monday still follows Sunday."

"Normally—" I set my bag down on the chair across from his desk, "—after a wedding, there is a honeymoon. There is a period of adjustment. There is, at minimum, a morning where no one expects you to answer emails before nine a.m.—"

"It's nine fourteen."

"—before ten a.m."

He finally looked up.

And that was always the problem with Zane Hills. Because when he actually looked at you — not the distracted, peripheral awareness he gave most people, but the full, direct, undivided attention — it did something to the air in the room that I had spent two years pretending not to notice.

He set the document down. Rose from his chair with the unhurried ease of a man who moved through the world entirely on his own schedule. Crossed toward me slowly, and I held my ground because I was not going to back up in his office — I had made that rule for myself on day one and I intended to honor it.

He stopped close enough that I had to tilt my chin up slightly to maintain eye contact.

His hand came to my jaw. Gently. Tilting my face a fraction, the pad of his thumb barely grazing my cheekbone. His other hand found my waist, drawing me forward just slightly — not enough to close the distance between us entirely, just enough to make me aware, very suddenly, of how small that distance was.

He leaned in.

I braced myself for whatever came next.

He sniffed my neck.

"You changed your perfume," he said. His voice was lower than usual, unhurried, with a quality I couldn't name and didn't trust. "This one is better."

I became aware that I had stopped breathing at some point in the last thirty seconds. I restarted that, quietly.

"What are you doing?" I asked. My voice came out steadier than I deserved credit for.

He pulled back just enough to look at me — really look at me — and there was something in his expression that I had never caught there before. Something underneath the composure, running quiet and deep like a current beneath still water.

My chest did something complicated.

Don't, I told myself. Don't you dare.

"You look like you haven't eaten," he said.

"I had coffee."

The warmth in his expression flickered out like a candle someone had walked past too quickly. He released my waist. Stepped back. Returned to his desk with the same measured ease he'd left it, and just like that, Zane Hills — my boss, my contractual husband, the most infuriating person I had ever been in an enclosed space with — was back.

"Coffee isn't food," he said, settling into his chair. "You need to start taking care of yourself properly. You represent this family now."

"I represent—" I pressed my lips together. Inhaled. "I will take that under advisement." A pause. "And for what it's worth, if I had even twenty minutes to myself this morning to eat a proper breakfast, I would have. But someone called me at eight forty-five to tell me I was already late, so."

He opened his mouth.

The door opened first.

We both turned.

She walked in the way that certain women walk into rooms — like the room had been waiting for her specifically, like everyone inside it was now an extra in a scene she was starring in. Expensive perfume arriving a half-second before she did. Dark hair, flawless makeup, a dress that had been chosen with surgical precision to communicate exactly one thing: look at me.

Clara Scott.

"What are you doing here?" Zane's voice dropped a register.

Clara blinked, then smiled — the kind of smile that doesn't reach the eyes because it was never intended to. "What do you mean, what am I doing here? Your mother said you were expecting me. She said you asked her to pass the message along."

"My mother said no such thing." His jaw was tight. "I told her yesterday that you were coming. That's all."

"Well." Clara settled into the chair across from his desk with the casual ownership of someone who believed every room she entered was already hers. "I'm here now. You could at least make me feel welcome."

I was standing directly behind her chair.

She had not looked at me once. Not when she walked in. Not when I shifted slightly. Not when I cleared my throat with what I thought was reasonable volume.

I was, apparently, furniture.

"Hi, Clara," I said. Deliberately. Clearly.

She turned then — slowly, as though the effort of acknowledging me required a moment of preparation.

"Oh! Skylar." Her smile adjusted, sharpened at the edges. "How are you? Still working hard, I see. You know, I really do admire that about you — the dedication it takes to keep pushing when things are..." Her eyes swept briefly over me, "...difficult. You must be under so much pressure with everything. And honestly, you're so lucky to have a job here. Zane pays well, I imagine, for someone in your position."

Every word landed exactly where she meant it to.

I smiled back at her. Bright. Unbothered.

Burning.

"Clara." Zane's voice cut through before I could formulate a response that wouldn't get me fired from my own marriage. "I need you to leave. I have work."

She laughed — light, dismissive, the laugh of someone who had never once taken the word no seriously. "Work? Zane, you own the building. You could disappear for a week and this place would still run." She uncrossed her legs and stood, and instead of moving toward the door she moved toward his desk — toward him — and perched on the edge of it with a practiced ease that told me this was not the first time she had done exactly this.

She leaned forward.

Her hand moved to his shoulder.

Her voice dropped to something that was designed to be private and was absolutely not.

I looked at the window.

I looked at the bookshelf.

I looked at the middle distance with the focused intensity of a woman who was absolutely not watching the scene unfolding eight feet to her left and was absolutely not feeling something hot and irrational climbing up through her ribcage.

"Stop."

Zane's voice — hard, final, nothing like his usual measured tone. He stood up sharply, stepped away from her hand, and walked to the office door. Pulled it open.

"Get out, Clara. Now."

For a moment, something cracked in her expression. Just a fracture — quickly sealed, quickly smoothed over — but it was there.

"Are you serious right now?" Her voice rose. "Do you know how many men—"

"I know. Thousands." He held the door. "I'm not one of them. Leave."

"I heard about the registry, Zane." She wasn't moving. Her eyes fixed on him with an intensity that made the air in the room feel pressurized. "It was on the news. Are you married? Just tell me. Are you married?"

The question landed in the room and stayed there.

Zane's eyes moved — briefly, barely — to me.

Then back to Clara.

"Leave my office," he said quietly.

She stared at him for a long moment. Then she picked up her purse with hands that were not quite steady, crossed to the door, and stopped just past the threshold.

"No one takes you from me, Zane." Her voice had gone soft. Almost sad. Almost real. "You're mine. You've always been mine. And you know it."

Then she was gone.

The door closed.

The room was very quiet.

Zane stood with one hand still on the door handle, his back to me, and I watched the set of his shoulders — the slight adjustment, the deliberate settling — as he put himself back together.

When he turned around, he walked directly to me.

Not his desk. Not his chair.

Me.

"I'm sorry." He said it plainly, without preamble or decoration. "I didn't know she'd come here. When I got home yesterday I found my parents and Kai waiting. My mother had already told Clara to fly down. I spent the evening managing the fallout."

I looked at him. "Is she always like that?"

"Which part specifically?"

"Any of it. All of it." I paused. "The part where she sat on your desk."

Something moved in his expression. "Skylar—"

"Are you jealous?"

The question came out before I could decide not to ask it.

"No." I said it too quickly. Tried again, slower. "I'm asking because I'm going to be working in this building every day, and if she intends to make a habit of walking in and—"

"You're jealous."

"I am not jealous, I am concerned about the professional environment—"

"Skylar." He said my name the way he said it sometimes — not sharply, not warmly, but with a directness that bypassed every defense I had constructed and made itself at home. "You're a contract wife. And my secretary. Clara is not your problem to manage."

The words were reasonable.

They were also, somehow, the specific shape of a thing that hurt.

"Right," I said. "Understood. I'll send the production department email when I get back to my desk."

"Good."

"Is there anything else?"

A beat.

"No."

"Then I'll leave you to it, Mr. Hills."

I walked out.

Down the corridor. Past the open-plan office where three people looked up and then immediately looked back down at their screens because they had the self-preservation instincts that I, apparently, lacked.

I made it to my office.

Closed the door.

Set the files I was carrying on the desk with more force than was strictly necessary.

Contract wife. The words sat in my chest like something swallowed wrong. Not your problem.

I dropped into my chair and stared at the ceiling.

"He could have moved," I said to no one. "Before she got that close. He could have simply — moved." I pressed both hands over my face. "And she didn't even notice the ring. How did she not notice the ring? It's enormous."

I dropped my hands.

Opened my laptop.

Found the email thread with the production department.

"The email," I muttered, fingers moving to the keyboard. "Send the email before he starts—"

"ZANE HILLS."

The voice came from outside my office — loud, theatrical, and instantly, viscerally familiar. The kind of voice that treated every corridor like a stage and every person in it like an audience.

My fingers stopped moving.

I knew that voice.

I had spent two years flinching at that voice.

Mrs. Hills.

A beat of silence. Then, from somewhere down the hall, unmistakably, Zane's voice — stripped of composure, stripped of everything:

"I don't want this, and I won't have this drama in my workplace—"

I was out of my chair before he finished the sentence.