CHAPTER THREE

Zahara's POV

For a moment neither of us spoke. My father looked between us, confused by the sudden silence…unaware that the air in the room had turned into something sharp enough to cut.

"Have you two met?" he asked.

Armando's jaw tightened. "Briefly," he said and something about the flat, careful way he said it; told me he intended to keep the rest buried…at least for now. I hold onto that mercy like a drowning woman grabbing driftwood.

"Small city," I muttered.

My father, satisfied with an answer that explained nothing...excused himself to get the contracts, leaving us alone in a room that suddenly felt too small for the two of us...and everything unsaid between us.

As the door shut behind him...the silence that followed, felt louder than anything either of us could have said out loud.

Armando studied me quietly... the way a man studies an opponent. Searching for a weakness he could use.

"You disappeared," he said once the latch settled into place. "I went back to that bar for a week. Same table. Same time, almost every night."

My heart slammed against my ribs. He had gone back and I had gone back too… but weeks later.

When the two lines on a pregnancy test would not stop shaking in my hand, and I had found him at a corner table with another woman's fingers laced through his…laughing like the night we shared had never happened at all.

Bittered, I turned around and walked out before he ever saw me, and I never went back again. I told myself it did not matter...that a stranger owed me nothing and I had believed that lie longer as it took me to raise two children alone.

"I did not think it mattered..." I said instead, my voice steadier than I felt. "It was one night. We did not exchange names."

"No, we did not." He agreed. " His eyes moved over my face like he was trying to solve something…measuring every difference between the woman he remembered and the one standing in front of him now. Older. Guarded. Sharper around the edges. 

"Yet here you are again."

"Here I am..." I lifted my chin. "Being sold to save my family's company, apparently to you."

Something almost like amusement crossed his face, gone as quickly as it came. "I am not in the business of buying wives, Miss Lawson.

I am in the business of solving problems. Your father's debt is one problem. There is another problem I need to solve…and marrying into your family happens to solve both at once."

"What problem could a stranger possibly solve for a man like you," I asked, genuinely curious despite myself.

"That is not something I discuss before a contract is signed..." he said, and something in the clipped way he answered; told me he had already said more than he intended.

"How romantic," I said instead, letting the sarcasm carry the moment past whatever he had almost admitted.

"I never claimed romance." He stepped closer...close enough that I had to tilt my head to hold his gaze, enough that I could caught the same faint scent of cedar I remembered from a hotel room five years ago...a detail I had spent years pretending I did not still carry.

"I need a wife who understands this is a contract...and not a fairy tale. No expectations. No affection. If you can manage that…then I can save everything your father is about to lose."

"And if I cannot manage that?"

"You will..." he said, with the kind of certainty that's undeniable which settled something restless in my chest...like I'm being handed a script for a part I had already decided to play.

"You strike me as a woman who does not let feelings...get in the way of survival."

"You know nothing about me."

"I know enough…" he said quietly. "I know you walked away from a stranger's bed without leaving your name. I know whatever brought you back into that bar the second time mattered enough that you left again without a word when you saw me with someone else." 

My breath caught. He had seen me. He knew I was there…watching, but said nothing.

"I am not a fool, Zahara. I simply do not chase what does not want to be caught."

I said nothing, because anything I said risked saying too much. I thought of Cherry's small fist curled against her cheek, of Edward's soft…open mouth in sleep with the version of this man who existed only in a hotel room five years ago, gentler than the one standing in front of me now.

He did not know about them and he will never know about them…not yet, not until I understood exactly what kind of man I would be tying myself to.

"Fine," I said. "A contract. Nothing more."

"Nothing more," he repeated, like he was carving the words into stone between us.

My father returned with the papers moments later, and I signed my name across the bottom of a document that would make me Armando Ivas's wife within the week…my hand steady even though my whole body screamed to run.

Armando watched me sign without a flicker of expression but just before he turned to leave...he paused at the door and looked back at me one last time.

"Whatever happened between us before…" he said quietly, "stays in that room. Are we clear?"

"Perfectly," I said.

He left, and my father followed shortly after to see him out, leaving me alone with the papers still warm from my own hand.

I walked out into the hallway a few minutes later and nearly collided with Clara who stood there with her arms crossed…like she had been waiting the whole time just to catch my face at its most unguarded.

"You signed already," she said, something unreadable moving behind her eyes. "Fast, for a woman who spent five years running from this family."

"I did not run from the family," I said. "I ran from you and your mother."

Her mouth opened like she wanted to fire something back, but instead she only looked at me a moment longer, almost like pity…before turning and walking away without another word, leaving me standing there more unsettled than her usual cruelty ever managed.

I stood alone in the hallway with a signed contract behind me and a secret sleeping soundly at Priya's apartment.

A secret that had his eyes and his stubborn chin…a secret that would shatter every rule he had just laid at my feet the moment he ever found out it existed.