CHAPTER 5: THE ANSWER

She called Julian’s office on Thursday morning, an hour before her deadline, and asked to

see him in person rather than send her answer through a lawyer. She told herself it was

because a decision this large deserved to be delivered face to face. She suspected,

privately, that it was also because she wanted to see his reaction wanted proof, one way

or another, that there was an actual person behind the calculations.

He met her in the same glass office, standing at the same window, and when he turned

around, something in his expression suggested he’d genuinely been uncertain which answer

he was about to get. It was the first time she’d seen anything in him that looked like it could

be called nerves, and she filed the observation away without knowing yet what to do with it.

“I have conditions,” Amara said, before he could speak first.

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth not a smile, but adjacent to one. “I’d have

been more concerned if you didn’t.”

“Separate bedrooms. Non-negotiable, and I don’t care how it looks to your board or your

photographers.” She kept her voice level, the way she’d practiced in the mirror at six that

morning. “My work at Whitfield Textiles continues, unaffected, and my father retains full

operational control of the company this isn’t a takeover with a ring attached to it. And

when the two years end, whatever divorce settlement you’re planning, I want it in writing

now, not renegotiated later when it’s convenient for you and inconvenient for me.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes.” She met his eyes, steady despite everything in her that wanted to look away first.

“You said this is a business transaction, not an emotional one. I need you to actually mean

that. I need you to not complicate this. Because I can survive being your wife on paper. I

don’t know that I could survive whatever it would do to my father, or to me, if it turned into

something messier than that.”

Julian was quiet for a moment, studying her the way he had the very first time, at the gala,

like a problem he was recalculating in real time and not entirely enjoying the new variables.

“I don’t do messy,” he said finally. “You have my word, for whatever that’s worth to a

stranger.”

“It’s worth something. I looked into you before I came here.” She lifted her chin slightly.

“Fifteen years in business, and you’ve never once broken a contract, even the ones your

own lawyers told you would’ve been more profitable to walk away from. That’s not nothing,

coming from a man your competitors call ruthless.”

“Ruthless and reliable aren’t mutually exclusive.” Something almost like amusement crossed

his face, gone as quickly as it arrived. “I’d have thought that was self-evident, given the

offer on the table.”

She held out her hand, the gesture feeling absurdly formal for what it represented a

marriage, a rescue, a two-year fiction they were both about to sign their names to in front of

witnesses who would never know it wasn’t real. “Then we have a deal, Mr. Cross.”

He crossed the room and shook her hand, his grip firm, brief, entirely professional. Up close,

she noticed something she hadn’t at the gala a faint scar near his jaw, old and pale, the

kind of thing a person only got from something that had actually hurt, once, a long time

before she’d ever met him.

“Welcome to the family business, Miss Whitfield,” Julian said. “Soon to be Mrs. Cross.”

Neither of them smiled. It didn’t feel like the moment for it not with a wedding date about

to be set like a board meeting, not with her father’s company hanging in the balance on the

other side of the handshake. But something passed between them anyway, quiet and

unnamed, the first small acknowledgment that whatever this arrangement turned into over

the next two years, it wasn’t going to stay as simple as either of them was currently

pretending it would.

“My assistant will send the paperwork today,” he added, already turning back toward his

desk, already, it seemed, three steps ahead into logistics. “The ceremony will be small.

Courthouse, then a press statement. I’d rather not give the gossip columns more material

than necessary.”

“Efficient,” Amara said, and there was an edge to it she didn’t quite manage to hide.

“It’s a wedding, Miss Whitfield, not a romance.” He didn’t look up from the folder he was

already opening. “I thought we’d agreed on that.”

She left his office with a signature drying on a marriage license and the strange, unsettled

feeling that she’d just agreed to something considerably larger than the paperwork

suggested though it would be weeks before she understood exactly how right she was.

The elevator ride down was eleven floors of silence, her own reflection watching her from

the polished doors, looking calmer than she felt. By the time she reached the lobby, her

phone had already buzzed twice an email from Julian’s assistant with a subject line that

read Whitfield-Cross: Ceremony Logistics, followed almost immediately by a text from her

father asking, simply, How did it go?

She stood on the sidewalk outside Cross Industries for a long moment before answering

either one, watching the late afternoon light catch the glass tower above her, thinking about

the fact that in exactly nine days she would legally become someone’s wife for the first time

in her life, and the someone in question had shaken her hand like they’d just closed a

merger. Which, she supposed, they had.

It went fine, she typed back to her father, because there was no version of the truth that

would make either of them feel better right now, and some things were easier to explain in

person, slowly, once the shock had worn off enough to sound like a decision instead of a

leap.