Chapter 3 - Ryan

She angled her head, cool as a surgeon. “So what do you want, Carter?”

“A role.”

Her brows rose. “A role.”

“One year. Appearances. Events. Cameras.” My voice didn’t change. It never needed to. “You’ll be my wife on paper and in public. We don’t have to like each other. We do have to look like we do.”

She stilled. Not fear. Calculation. The robe shifted with her breath, then went still.

“That’s a hell of a pitch to make in a hallway that smells like bleach.”

“It’s not a pitch.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know enough.”

“Enlighten me.”

I stepped closer. Slow. Measured. Close enough for her to choose whether to hold or yield. She held. Good. I preferred the ones who made me earn it.

“You don’t have a pimp waiting outside,” I said. “No boyfriend skimming your tips. No powder ring on your keys. No OnlyFans link feeding the same men pretending to hate you.” I held her eyes and listed it like inventory. “Your file is clean where I need it to be. You’re the cleanest kind of dirty. Which makes you useful.”

Her laugh punched low and sharp. “Useful. That what you call women you get hard for and pretend you don’t?”

I gave her nothing. She wasn’t wrong. She just liked to hear it hurt.

A muscle jumped in my neck. I hated that tell.

Her gaze slid down my forearm to my hand, veins up, knuckles scarred, then back to my face, no hurry in it.

“Why me, Carter? You’ve got money. You’ve got looks. You could have any woman from your world, someone who’d kill to wear your ring.” Her head tipped, eyes narrowing. “So why a stripper?”

I let the silence stretch. Then I cut it clean.

“Because I don’t do girlfriends. I don’t do soft. And marrying a stripper is payback to a man who thought he could dictate my life even after he was six feet under.”

The words dropped like a verdict. No tremor. No heat. A fact laid out on cold concrete.

Her eyes sharpened. Not softer. Sharper. I watched the math in them shift from insult to opportunity to test.

“What does payback buy me?” she asked.

“Half a million.”

No ceremony. Numbers should land like facts.

Her brows lifted. No gasp. No flinch. Just a small twitch at the edge of her mouth—half smirk, half disbelief.

“Half a million for a role that makes me your shadow? Either you’re desperate or you think I’m stupid.”

She didn’t look away. Didn’t blink. She did the math like a pro.

“Half up front?”

“No. Three parts. Signing. Six months. Completion.”

She rolled her shoulder once under the robe. A tendon moved along her throat. “And the rules?”

“No scandal. No leaks. And once you sign, you don’t go back to the stage.”

Her chin ticked up one degree. “You think you get to tell me where my body goes?”

“I tell my name where it goes.” I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to. “And it won’t go on a marquee.”

Her mouth curved again, sharper now. “Then maybe I’ll think about it.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Eight. Somewhere that doesn’t smell like bleach. You’ll have the contract.”

She gave a half-shrug. Eyes narrowed. Voice edged with skepticism.

“We’ll see if it’s worth my time.”

She let that sit. Then, with the same blade tilt, “What’s a man like you doing paying a woman like me to stand beside him? You’ve got money, power, looks. Don’t tell me you couldn’t have a dozen socialites lining up to spread their legs for your last name.”

I kept my breathing even.

“I don’t pay for women. I pay for silence. For control.” I held her stare until she had to choose between blinking and losing. She didn’t blink. “That’s worth more than pussy, Amber. That’s why it’s you. You don’t beg. You don’t cling. You don’t play house.” I slid my gaze down to the knotted belt of her robe and back. “You play survival. That makes you worth the risk.”

The words tasted like truth and something I didn’t want to name.

The bass hit a new phrase. Voices laughed on the other side of the wall and then blurred into the next song. A draft moved down the corridor and lifted the edge of her robe. Her thigh went goose-pimpled and then smoothed. She didn’t react.

I wanted to.

I stepped close enough that her perfume cut through the bleach—clean skin, something cheap trying to be expensive, not winning. I didn’t mind. It told the truth.

“Think it over,” I said. “But don’t take too long. If you don’t bite, I move to the next. Simple.”

I let the corner of my mouth lift, cruel and deliberate.

“But Amber... you’d make a fucking good payback.”

Her eyes flicked to my mouth for a split second, and it was enough. Something charged between us, alive, wrong, magnetic.

We stood like that, breath for breath, heat for heat, long enough to feel like the corridor shrank. Long enough for the watch on my wrist to leave crescent dents in my skin. Long enough for my cock to remind me what I was pretending not to think about.

The leash pulled tighter tonight. Control. Always control. The mantra came too late.

She didn’t flinch. She let the quiet do the work and stared back like she had all night to waste daring me. Then she turned. No hurry. No extra sway for effect. The robe swung against the back of her thigh. Her heels cut three clean lines into the floor. The dark took her like the hallway had only borrowed her for a minute and wanted itself back.

The sound of her leaving stayed longer than it should.

Silas peeled off the wall, steps soundless.

“Problems?”

“None.” I adjusted my jacket like it mattered and kept my face blank. “Send her the address.”

His eyes flicked once, down, up... quick as a knife. He’d caught the tell: the way my hand hovered a fraction too close to my belt; the fraction-second I took to breathe heat down. He didn’t smile. He didn’t comment. That wasn’t his role. He filed it somewhere quiet.

“Yes,” he said, voice flat as stone. No judgment. No approval. Just acknowledgment, like he was reminding me he was the vault that held what I didn’t say out loud.

We stood there while the next song bled into the next. A door slammed somewhere out back. A bartender cursed. The EXIT sign hummed. The stink of bleach sat at the back of my throat. Whiskey seeped out of the concrete, stale and sour. The kind of smell men pretend not to notice when they’re busy looking at a body.

It all smelled like consequence.

Fitting for a deal that wasn’t about romance. Only power.

Or that’s what I kept telling myself.

I stayed longer than I should have. Jaw locked. Pulse forcing itself back under command. She’d gotten under my skin in under five minutes. I hated that almost as much as I craved it.

The mix burned. Control didn’t fix it. Nothing did.

Silas’s phone vibrated once in his pocket. He checked it without looking away from the corridor mouth. “Driver’s ready,” he said.

I nodded. The motion hurt more than it should have, muscles tight across my shoulders. I pushed off the steel door. The hinge squealed and then shut itself like it was offended.

At the service exit I paused, palm on the bar. Metal bit. I liked the bite — proof I was still in charge of my hands.

Barely.

“Client file?” I asked.

“Complete,” Silas said. “No red flags beyond what we expected.”

“Keep it close.”

“Always.”

I pushed the door. Cold night air knifed in. City noise swallowed the bass. The SUV idled at the curb, windows dark. Streetlight washed the alley in sodium yellow and made everything look tired.

I checked the watch biting into my wrist. Tiny teeth. Focus. Time carving itself into habit.

Thirty days on paper. Fewer in practice. The countdown already felt personal.

Amber Cole had just walked into my life. Tomorrow she’d decide. Silence wouldn’t save me this time.

And if she had half the fire I thought she did, she’d ruin everything I’d built.

Or maybe that was the point all along.