CONTRACT MARRIAGE TO MY BILLIONAIRE BESTFRIEND

The kiss had gone on eleven seconds too long, and Sophia Bennett was the only person in the ballroom counting.

Liam Kingston's hand had started at her jaw, steady and practised, exactly where marketing wanted it for the charity gala rehearsal. Somewhere around second four it had slid to the curve of her neck instead, and his fingers had curled there like he'd forgotten there was a call sheet at all, like he'd forgotten there was a camera crew testing angles twenty feet away.

Sophia had kissed this man forty-three times in six years of friendship. Every single one lasted three seconds. Camera-ready. Rehearsed. The kind of kiss two best friends performed when the press needed a photo and Liam needed to look like a man who wasn't married to his company.

This one didn't feel rehearsed.

His mouth was patient at first. Then it wasn't. Sophia felt his control slip somewhere around second seven, felt it in the way his breath changed against her lips, in the way his other hand found her waist and pulled her half an inch closer than any script required. She made a small sound against his mouth that she would deny under oath.

When he finally broke away, his forehead stayed pressed to hers. His eyes had gone dark and unguarded, stripped of every boardroom instinct he'd spent a decade perfecting.

"Sophia." Just her name. Nothing else. And it undid her more thoroughly than the kiss had.

Then his phone buzzed against the piano behind them, and Sophia watched Liam Kingston, heir to an empire worth twelve billion dollars, blink twice and disappear back inside himself. His spine straightened. His jaw reset into its public setting. He stepped back like the last minute hadn't happened at all, like she hadn't just felt his heartbeat slam beneath her palm.

"That's Marcus," he said, checking the screen without quite meeting her eyes. "About the will."

Sophia pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, trying to remember how ordinary breathing worked, and followed him out of the ballroom.

Marcus Delray was already seated in the study when they arrived, a leather folder open on the desk in front of him. He didn't stand. He didn't smile. Sophia had known him for years and had watched him deliver difficult news to Liam's father with the exact same flat, careful tone he used now.

"Your grandfather's will contained a provision we weren't authorised to disclose until the estate settled," Marcus said. "It settled this morning."

Liam sat without being asked, motioning for Sophia to take the chair beside him. Old habit. She had sat in that exact spot the day his father died too.

"Go on."

"Kingston Global transfers into a family trust unless you're legally married before your thirtieth birthday." Marcus turned the folder around so the relevant paragraph faced them both. "Your grandfather's language, not mine. He wanted, and I'm quoting directly, 'a partner who chose you, not the company.'"

The room tilted slightly under Sophia's feet.

"When's my birthday," Liam said, though he knew the answer better than anyone in the room. He did this sometimes, asking questions with obvious answers so his mouth had something to occupy it while his mind scrambled to catch up.

"Twenty-one days."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing Sophia had ever sat through.

"There's no one," Liam said finally, and something in the way he said it made her chest ache. Three years of watching him date women who wanted the Kingston name more than they wanted him. Three years of standing beside him at events, congratulating him on relationships she privately hoped would end. "Marcus, there is no one I can marry in three weeks."

"Then control passes to the trust on your birthday. The board votes on new leadership within ninety days. He anticipated a legal challenge. The language is built to survive one."

Liam's hands curled against the arms of his chair. Sophia had watched him lose deals worth hundreds of millions without this particular stillness settling into his face. This was different. This was a man realising the one thing he'd trained his entire life to inherit could be stripped from him by a dead man's paperwork.

She should have stayed quiet.

She had never once, in six years, managed to stay quiet when Liam Kingston looked like that.

"Marry me," Sophia said.

Both men turned. Marcus's pen stopped moving mid-stroke. Liam's expression didn't change so much as freeze, like her words hadn't finished landing yet.

"It's a joke," Sophia added quickly, heat crawling up her throat. "Obviously. Unless it needs to not be a joke, in which case I suppose I'm volunteering, which is insane, and somebody should really stop me from talking right now."

"Sophia."

"I have a lease. I have a job. I have a cat who tolerates exactly one human on this earth, which we should probably discuss before—"

"Sophia." His voice cut cleanly through hers, quiet and absolutely certain. He was looking at her the way he had ninety seconds earlier in the ballroom, like she was the one fixed point in a room that had started spinning without permission.

"Yes," he said.

Marcus set down his pen. "I'll draft the contract."

Sophia opened her mouth to explain that she hadn't meant it, that of course she hadn't meant it, that marrying your best friend to save his inheritance belonged in the kind of movie she watched alone on Friday nights, not in a real conference room with a real attorney and consequences that would follow her for the rest of her life.

But Marcus was already sliding a folder across the desk toward her, a pen resting on top, and Liam was watching her with an expression she had spent three years actively refusing to name.

Her hand hovered over the signature line. Twenty-one days ago her biggest problem had been whether to renew her apartment lease or finally move somewhere with decent water pressure. Now she was seconds from becoming Mrs Sophia Kingston, and the man across the desk hadn't looked away from her once.

"Six months," Marcus said, tapping the relevant clause with one finger. "Renewable by mutual agreement, dissolvable afterward with no penalty to either party."

Six months. That was all this had to be. A business arrangement between two friends who trusted each other completely, nothing more, nothing that would leave a mark once the contract expired and they both returned to the separate lives they'd been living before tonight's rehearsal kiss had lasted eleven seconds too long.

Sophia picked up the pen and signed her name.

Marcus flipped to the final page and set it in front of Liam without a word. Liam didn't glance at the terms. He didn't ask a single question about the six months, the confidentiality clause, or the penalty attached to breaking either. He simply reached for the pen still warm from Sophia's hand and signed beneath her name like he'd been waiting years for the chance