I Rented a Fiancé and He Owns the Hotel

Nell’s POV

“Nell? Nell Gallagher? You’re our wedding planner?”

I knew that voice. I would have known it at the bottom of a well.

Roisin’s elbow found my ribs. “Don’t turn around,” she breathed. “Whatever you do, do not turn around.”

I turned around.

Brendan Kavanagh stood in the middle of the Hotel Doyle Grand ballroom in a navy suit that cost more than my car. Same blond hair. Same smile, the one he used at open houses, the one that said trust me, I’m easy to trust. Eight months ago that smile had ended our engagement over the phone, three weeks before our wedding.

I still had the dress. It hung in my closet in a garment bag. I had never worked out what to do with it.

“Brendan,” I said. My voice came out level. I was proud of it.

“Wow. It’s really you.” He spread his arms at the empty ballroom, the chandeliers, the forty round tables waiting for linen. “Small world.”

“Chicago is not a small world.”

“Brendan?” A young woman hurried over in a cream sweater, her curls bouncing. “Is this her? Is this the famous Nell?”

“Aoife Fitzgerald,” Brendan said, and put his hand on the small of her back. “My fiancée.”

Fiancée.

Roisin made a noise like a punctured tire.

Roisin leaned in until her mouth was at my ear. “Say the word and I push him into the fountain.”

“The fountain is in the lobby.”

“I’ll carry him.”

I almost laughed. Roisin Walsh has been my best friend since the first week of college. She has held my hair, my deposits, and my dignity. She was the only person who’d sat on my kitchen floor the night he left, eating cold pad thai out of the box, saying nothing at all.

“Nell Gallagher,” I said, and shook Aoife’s hand. It was warm and a little damp. She was twenty-four, maybe. She had the kind of face that had never been told no. “I’m so happy to meet you. Congratulations.”

“Brendan says you’re the best in the city! He says nobody can do a big wedding like you.” She glanced between us. “Wait. Do you two know each other?”

“Old friends,” Brendan said.

“Very old,” I said.

“Nell and I dated for a while.” He shrugged. “Nothing serious.”

I had a clipboard in my hands. I gripped it so hard the clip left a dent in my thumb.

Nothing serious. Fifteen months. A ring. A deposit on a lake house in Michigan. My mother’s rosary, tucked into my bouquet.

“Is that a problem?” Roisin asked, in her sweetest voice. She’s five foot one and she once made a caterer cry. “Because we can send another planner. Gallagher and Company has one.”

“We have two,” I said. “Roisin is the other one.”

“No, no.” A booming voice rolled over us. “No problem at all!”

Desmond Fitzgerald came across the ballroom like a ship coming into harbor. Big shoulders, silver hair, a gold watch the size of a hockey puck. He was the kind of developer whose name was on the sides of buildings. He shook my hand until it hurt.

“Eighty-five thousand dollars, Miss Gallagher. That’s the f*e. You do this wedding right, and I send every deal I have to your door. You do it wrong.” He smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. “Well. We won’t talk about that.”

Eighty-five thousand.

I did the math in my head. I did it every night. Rent was two months behind. Payroll was three weeks from dead. Word had gotten around after Brendan left me, the way it does in this business. Poor Nell. Did you hear? Nobody wanted their wedding planned by the girl who got dumped.

This contract was not a job. It was oxygen.

“I’ll make it perfect,” I said.

“I know you will.” Desmond clapped my shoulder. “And you’ll have a date for Saturday, of course.”

“A date?”

“The family dinner,” Aoife said brightly. “At our house in Lake Forest. It’s a tradition. Everybody brings someone. Daddy’s rule.”

“It’s a very firm rule,” Desmond said.

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll be working.”

“You’ll be working the wedding,” said Brendan lightly. “Saturday’s a dinner. You’d come as a guest.” He tilted his head. His eyes went soft and awful. “Unless you’d rather not? I’d understand. It can’t be easy.”

“What can’t?”

“Being on your own. Seeing all this.” He waved at the chandeliers. “Roisin says you don’t really date anymore.”

I turned my head slowly.

Roisin’s eyes went round. “I did not say that. I said you were busy.”

“She works nights,” Brendan told Aoife, in a stage whisper. “Poor thing. Ever since.”

Ever since. He said it like it was a sad little illness.

My face went hot. My ears buzzed. My throat closed like a fist, and I couldn’t swallow. I could feel Aoife’s sympathy settling on me like a wet blanket. I could feel Desmond doing arithmetic behind his eyes. If the planner was lonely and broken, maybe the planner was a risk.

Eighty-five thousand dollars.

I tugged my left earlobe. It’s a habit. It means I’m about to do a stupid thing.

“I’m engaged,” I said.

The ballroom went quiet.

“Engaged?” Brendan’s smile froze.

“Engaged.”

“Nell,” Roisin whispered, out of the side of her mouth. “What are you doing?”

“Since when?” Brendan said.

“Since a while.”

“You didn’t say a word.”

“It didn’t come up.”

“To whom?”

“To whom what?”

“To whom are you engaged?”

I opened my mouth. The whole room stared. Aoife was leaning in. Desmond had folded his arms. Somewhere behind me, a chandelier chimed softly, like a tiny bell counting down.

I looked for the exit. I looked for a waiter. I looked for any human being with a pulse and a spare hour.

“He’s,” I said, “not here right now.”

“Not here.”

“He’s, um. At work.”

“What does he do?” Brendan asked.

“He’s very tall.”

Roisin covered her eyes.

Brendan laughed, that warm, easy laugh that made everyone else laugh too. “Nell. Honey. You don’t have to do this.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Sweetheart, it’s okay to be alone.”

“To me.”

The voice came from behind us. Low. Calm. A little rough at the edges, like a cello someone had left in a car.

Every head turned.

A man stood in the ballroom doorway with a paper coffee cup in one hand. Gray sweater, dark jeans, a plain black ball cap pulled low. He was tall, I’ll give myself that one. He was very tall. Beneath the cap I could see a hard jaw, a day of stubble, and the greenest eyes I had ever seen on a human being.

He walked toward us like the room belonged to him.

“Sorry I’m late, love,” he said. He set the coffee on a table, took my hand, and lifted it to his mouth. His lips brushed my knuckles. Warm. Slow. My knees forgot how they worked.

“Traffic on Michigan Avenue,” he said, still looking at me. His thumb rested on the inside of my wrist. My pulse was going like a drum, and he had to feel it. His eyes held mine, steady and dark and just a little bit amused, and they said one thing plain as print. Go along with it.

“Did you miss me?” he asked.

I had never seen this man in my life.