4

The party was held in a ballroom with ceilings so high Ivy half expected weather to form near them, and she spent the first twenty minutes standing near a pillar in a green dress that cost more than her rent, doing her level best not to look like a woman who'd priced everything in the room down to the second.

Sterling found her there, one hand at the small of her back, close enough to look natural, far enough that she noticed the careful, deliberate space he'd left, exactly as promised.

"You clean up well," he said.

"You clean up expected," Ivy said. "Nobody's staring at you. They're staring because they can't figure out who I am."

"That's the point." He guided her toward the room, voice low enough that only she could hear it. "Smile like you find me tolerable. Reagan's watching from the bar and she takes notes."

"On what?"

"On whether this is going to work."

It worked, for the first hour. Ivy said almost nothing, let Sterling do the talking, learned quickly that his public voice, warm, easy, faintly amused, was a completely different instrument from the voice he'd used on her in his office. She watched him charm three separate board members and a senator's wife without once meaning a word of it, and found herself, against every instinct she had, wanting to know what the real version sounded like.

She got her answer sooner than she expected, and not from him.

"You must be the new one." A man appeared at her elbow somewhere near the second hour, expensive suit, easy smile, the kind of confidence that came from never once being told no. "Trent Calloway. No relation, I hope, given what I'm about to say to you."

"I don't think we've met."

"We haven't. I know Sterling, though. Everyone here knows Sterling." Trent's eyes moved over her in a way that made Ivy's skin crawl, slow and assessing. "You're better than the last one. Prettier, at least. Reagan had ice water where her personality should be."

"I wasn't aware there was a ranking system."

"There's always a ranking system, sweetheart." He leaned in closer than Ivy would have allowed from anyone, closer than the space Sterling had so carefully maintained all night. "Question is how long you'll last on the list."

Ivy stepped back, but Trent's hand landed on her arm before she'd fully cleared the distance, fingers closing just a beat too firm to be casual, and she opened her mouth to tell him exactly where he could put his hand when a second one closed over his wrist instead.

Sterling didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. Something in the set of his shoulders did all the talking, a stillness gone suddenly, completely lethal.

"You're touching something that isn't yours, Trent."

Trent's smile flickered, recalibrated, went oily. "Didn't realize you'd gotten possessive this fast, Vane. Must be serious."

"Take your hand off her arm."

He did, slowly, like it was his idea. "No offense meant."

"None taken," Sterling said, in a voice that suggested a great deal of offense had, in fact, been taken, and would be remembered. Trent melted back into the crowd with the particular speed of a man recalculating whether tonight was worth the trouble, and Sterling turned to Ivy, jaw tight, eyes doing something dark and unreadable.

"Are you alright?"

"I'm fine. I've had worse than a grabby stranger at a party." Ivy pulled her arm back anyway, rubbing at the spot where Trent's fingers had been, more unsettled than she wanted to admit. "You didn't have to do that."

"Yes," Sterling said. "I did."

"Because it's bad for the arrangement if someone else touches your fake girlfriend?"

Something crossed his face, quick and complicated, gone before she could name it. "Something like that."

She didn't believe him, not entirely, and the not-believing sat strange and warm in her chest the rest of the night, through two more hours of small talk and photographs and Reagan's approving nod from across the room. It sat there on the drive home too, in the quiet car, Sterling across from her, uncharacteristically not talking, watching the city slide by the window like it owed him an answer to something.

"Thank you," Ivy said finally, when the silence got too loud to sit in. "For tonight. For that, with Trent."

"Don't thank me." Sterling's voice was rough, quieter than she'd heard it. "I didn't do it for the arrangement."

Before she could ask what he meant, his phone lit up on the seat between them, buzzing hard enough to rattle against the leather, and Reagan's name flashed across the screen with three missed calls stacked underneath it.

Sterling picked it up, and Ivy watched every trace of the man from thirty seconds ago disappear, replaced by something colder, more controlled.

"What," he said, and then went very still, listening, his knuckles going white around the phone.

"What is it?" Ivy asked.

Sterling looked up at her, and for the first time since the lobby, she saw real fear behind his eyes.

"There's a photo," he said. "Of you. From three years ago. It's already online."

"What photo?"

He turned the phone around, and Ivy's whole body went cold looking at the screen, at a picture of herself she hadn't seen in three years, from a night she'd tried very hard to forget, captioned in a way that made her stomach drop straight through the floor of the car.