LOGINShe went on a blind date to please her parents… and met her ex-boyfriend’s billionaire boss instead. Adrian Knight needs a fake girlfriend. Zara needs a fresh start. A simple contract: public romance, private distance, and absolutely no feelings. But the more they pretend, the more real it feels and breaking the deal might be the one thing neither of them can survive.
View MoreThe call comes at seven forty-three in the morning, which is how I know it is serious.Eleanor Knight does not call before nine. She has opinions about people who communicate before nine. She considers it aggressive.Adrian’s name is on my screen and I pick up fast, still half-dressed, one shoe on, coffee going cold on the counter.“Eleanor’s been taken to hospital,” he says. No preamble. No good morning. Just that.My stomach drops. “What happened?”“Her housekeeper found her this morning. She was, apparently, unable to get up.” A pause, and his voice is controlled the way it gets when he is frightened and refusing to show it. “I’m on my way there now. I just, I wanted you to know.”I am already looking for my other shoe.“I’ll meet you there,” I say.Another pause. Shorter. “You don’t have to.”“I know,” I say. “I’ll meet you there.”I find the shoe under the couch, which is where shoes go when they want to cause problems, and I am out the door in four minutes.-----Eleanor is sitt
I make it three days.Three days of shorter texts, busier excuses, and responses that are technically answers but give him nothing real to hold onto. Three days of being the version of me that existed before any of this, before candlelit dinners and crooked forks and a man who reads a menu like a legal brief and somehow makes it funny.Three days.Adrian lasts exactly that long before he shows up at my studio.I hear the door and assume it is the courier I am expecting with fabric samples. I do not look up from my desk. “Just leave it by the front, I’ll sign in a second.”Silence.I look up.Adrian is standing in the doorway in his work suit, jacket on, tie straight, looking like a man who has come directly from somewhere important and made a deliberate detour. He is not holding fabric samples. He is holding two coffees.I stare at him.He looks around my studio with the calm, measuring expression he uses for everything, taking in the mood boards and the paint swatches pinned to the w
The restaurant Adrian picks is small, candlelit, and has no photographers outside, which under normal circumstances would make me happy.Tonight it just means there is no performance to hide behind.He is already there when I arrive, which he never is. Adrian Knight is a man who operates on a schedule so tight that being early is practically a personality flaw. But he is there, jacket off, sleeves rolled, looking at his phone with the particular frown he gets when someone says something professionally stupid in an email. He looks up when I walk in and the frown disappears.“You’re on time,” he says.“You’re early,” I say.“I had a good reason to be.” He says it simply, like it is nothing, and pulls out my chair, and I sit down and think about Vanessa’s voice and feel something tighten in my chest.He’s very good at making people feel special for exactly as long as he needs them.Stop it, I tell myself.I pick up the menu.The first ten minutes are easy enough. We order. Adrian studies
The thing about poison is that it never tastes like poison.I think about that on the walk back to the studio, my coat buttoned wrong at the collar, Mia’s contact still glowing on my screen. The lunch was good. The restaurant was warm. Vanessa was, genuinely, excellent company. And somewhere between the starter and the second glass of wine, I stop watching her the way Mia tells me to. I stop cataloguing the warmth and the carefully chosen word and the non-intimidating restaurant. I just sit there. And let myself be disarmed.Which is what she wants. Which I know is what she wants.And I do it anyway.I call Mia.She picks up before the second ring. “Tell me everything.”“I told you already. She was nice. Warm. She apologized.”“For what specifically.”“For how she treated me when Adrian and I first got together. Said she couldn’t believe he was actually letting someone in, and then she saw how he was with me and she,” I pause, trying to land it accurately, “she said it was different.”






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