CHAPTER THREE

Pearl's POV

 "What?!"

 The word flew out of my mouth before my brain had any say in the matter. Straight into the microphone, loud enough that the journalist in the back row looked up from his notepad.

 I turned to look at Dominic slowly. He turned to look at me at the same time, and for one single second — so quick I almost convinced myself I imagined it — something moved at the corner of his mouth. A smirk.

 That absolute bastard.

 It disappeared just as fast as it came, and his face went back to being a wall, and he raised his hand to my cheek. His fingers curved around my face gently, and from where the cameras were sitting it probably looked tender. Like a husband steadying his overwhelmed wife.

 From where I was sitting, his grip was just firm enough to be a warning. I smiled anyway.

 "She wasn't expecting that." He said it warmly, turning back to the room. "We had originally planned the honeymoon for a week after the wedding, but I decided to move it up. I wanted to surprise her." He paused, and his thumb moved once against my cheekbone in something that was almost an apology. "Clearly it worked."

 Laughter rolled through the room. The kind of laughter that meant they believed him and I kept smiling, but Inside I was constructing a very detailed list of grievances.

 "So where are you taking her?" A journalist near the front leaned forward.

 "Paris." He said it simply. More murmuring. A few sighs from the female journalists. Someone near the back actually started clapping and it spread through the room before it could be stopped.

 I sat there in my black gown with Dominic's hand still light on my face and thought about all the ways I was going to make him pay for this the moment we were alone.

 *****

 The rest of the press conference moved quickly after that. Dominic steered it the way he steered everything — efficiently, with minimal visible effort, like a man who had been managing rooms full of people since before I knew how to drive. Most of the remaining questions went to him and he answered them in that measured, careful way he had, where every sentence felt considered before it left his mouth.

 The ones directed at me I answered. The ones not directed at me I also answered, but only twice, and only because the opportunity was too good to leave on the table. He didn't look at me when I did it. He just became very still in a way that I was starting to recognise as his version of screaming.

 When it was over we stood, shook hands with the event organiser, smiled for approximately forty more photographs, and walked back out to the car.

 The moment the car door closed behind us the smile dropped off my face like I had unclipped it.

 "What the hell was that, Dominic?" I turned to face him.

 Outside the tinted windows I could see reporters still swarming the pavement, cameras pointing at the car, trying to catch anything through the glass. The car pulled smoothly away from the kerb and they fell behind us.

 Dominic was already reaching forward to collect his phone from Thomas in the front seat. He leaned back, unlocked the screen, and started scrolling. He didn't look up.

 "Someone thought she was the only one that could play games." He said it lightly. 

 "What does that mean?"

 "It means..." he turned a page on whatever he was reading, still not looking at me, "...that I told you to keep quiet. You didn't. So they asked questions they wouldn't have asked if you'd followed the plan. And I played the same card you played." He looked up then, briefly. Just long enough to smirk at me once then back to his phone. "Consider us even."

 I stared at his profile. I wanted to grab his phone and throw it out of the window. I wanted to say seventeen different things, several of which would have made Thomas uncomfortable in the front seat. I wanted to reach over and physically remove that smirk from his face with my bare hands.

 Instead I turned and looked out of my own window. My jaw was tight, my hands folded in my lap.

 Outside, Manhattan moved past in its usual Saturday evening way — indifferent and beautiful and completely unbothered by the fact that I was sitting in a car next to the most infuriating man I had ever met in my twenty-seven years of life.

 I pressed my lips together. Fine. We were even...For now.

 ******

 Day Two — Paris, France

 The hotel was not a hotel.

 I mean technically it was. It had a lobby and a concierge and a man at the door in a uniform who had taken our bags without being asked. But calling it a hotel felt like calling the ocean a puddle. It was the kind of building that made you slow down when you walked through the entrance because your brain needed a moment to process what your eyes were seeing.

 We had arrived early that morning. The flight had been long and I had slept through most of it, which I was choosing to count as a personal victory because I had fallen asleep in my seat fully intending to stay awake out of stubbornness. Dominic had worked the entire flight. I knew because I woke up twice and both times his laptop was open and his reading glasses were on and he hadn't moved.

 I hadn't known he wore glasses. I had gone back to sleep before I could think about it too much.

 The room they brought us to was on the top floor. I walked in ahead of Dominic and stopped in the middle of the sitting room and just stood there for a moment.

 It was enormous. All cream and beige and soft gold, the kind of colour palette that made everything look like it was being lit from inside. The sitting room alone was almost as large as the entire apartment I had shared with two roommates before everything changed. Floor to ceiling windows on one side, all of Paris spread out beyond them like someone had arranged the city specifically for this view. The Eiffel Tower was visible from where I was standing. I could see it without moving my feet.

 I had never been to Paris before. I had wanted to come since I was twelve years old and had found a picture book about it in the school library and had kept it past the return date because I wasn't ready to give it back.

 I was not going to let Dominic Ashford see that this mattered to me. I kept my face neutral and moved further into the room.

 The sitting room connected to a short hallway. I followed it. The first door opened into a walk-in closet that was already half-filled — someone had arranged clothes on both sides, tags still on, everything in my size. I stood in the doorway and looked at it for a moment. So that was why he had told me not to bother packing. I had assumed it was a control thing.

 Maybe it was still a control thing.

 I moved to the next door. It was a bedroom and one bed in it. It was a beautiful bed. I want to be fair about that — it was enormous and white and looked like it had been assembled specifically to make a person feel like they were sleeping inside a cloud. But it was one bed which meant —

 I walked back out to the sitting room. Dominic was on the sofa. He had his laptop open on the glass table already, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, looking like a man who had simply continued working from a different location and the location happening to be Paris was entirely irrelevant to him.

 "Dominic." I stopped in front of the sofa. "There's only one bedroom."

 "I know." He didn't look up.

 "One bed."

 "I'm aware."

 "So what exactly —" I started.

 "We're here as a couple." He turned a page. "What did you expect?"

 I stared at the top of his head. "I expected you to have planned something slightly more reasonable, like —"

 "You can sleep on the sofa." He said it pleasantly. "Or the bathroom floor if you prefer. I hear the tiles are Italian marble."

 "You think this is funny?" I stepped closer.

 He finally looked up. His expression was perfectly flat. "Am I laughing?" That bastard. 

 "I honestly cannot —"

 Three sharp knocks at the door. I stopped talking, while Dominic looked back at his laptop, being nonchalant. I waited a second to see if he was going to move. He was not going to move. He had the energy of a man who had never answered a door himself in his life and had no plans to start today.

 I turned and walked to the door. It had one of those electronic key locks. I pressed the handle and it didn't open, so I grabbed the key card from the small table beside the door and tapped it against the panel. The light went green. I pulled the door open.

 And then I stopped. Everything literally stopped. 

 The person standing on the other side of that door was the last person I had expected to see. The last person I wanted to see. The last person who should have been standing in a five star hotel hallway in Paris, France, on th

e second day of what was supposed to be my fake honeymoon.

 My brain did a full stop.

 "You?" The word came out small. "What the...what are you doing here?!”