Married to the Wrong Billionaire

The morning Lena Cole accidentally got married, she woke up late, burned her toast, and missed the first bus by four seconds. It was that kind of day from the start. She stood at the bus stop with her bag on one shoulder and her hair still damp from a shower she'd rushed through, eating the unburned half of the toast over a napkin so she wouldn't get crumbs on her work blouse, and she thought about what her sister had said at breakfast. "You need to be there by noon, Lena. Don't be late. Don't say anything weird. And for the love of everything, please just be normal for one hour." As if Lena had ever been the one making things difficult in that apartment.

The blind date had been her aunt's idea, arranged through some matchmaking service her aunt swore by, the kind that charged more money than Lena made in a month and promised compatible matches based on personality assessments and financial profiles. The man's name was Peter. He was an accountant. Her aunt had described him as stable, which Lena understood to mean boring, which was fine. Boring was fine. Boring meant predictable, and predictable meant she could plan around it, and planning was the only thing keeping her life from completely falling apart at present.

She caught the next bus and arrived at the restaurant eleven minutes late. She gave her name to the host, who checked a list and pointed her toward a private dining room at the back. Lena straightened her blouse, tucked her bag under her arm, and went to meet the man her aunt had decided she should marry.

---

The private dining room had two doors, and she went through the wrong one. It wasn't entirely her fault — the hallway split without signage, both doors identical, both slightly ajar, and she could hear someone inside the room on the left, so she went left, which seemed logical and turned out to be completely wrong.

The man sitting at the table was not Peter the accountant. She knew that immediately and completely, the way you know certain things without needing evidence. Peter, based on his profile photo, was average height and slightly soft around the middle, with the pleasant unremarkable face of someone who remembered your birthday and never caused problems. The man at this table was none of those things. He was tall even sitting down, dark-suited, with a face arranged in a way that made other people feel they were taking up too much space simply by existing near him.

He was looking at his watch when she walked in, and when he looked up, his eyes assessed her in about one second, the way people assess things they didn't order and are deciding whether to send back. "You're late," he said.

Lena checked her own watch. "Eleven minutes. I'm sorry, the bus—"

"I don't need the reason." He said it without heat, which somehow made it worse.

She opened her mouth, closed it, and sat down across from him because that seemed to be what was expected, still operating on the assumption that this was Peter, that the profile photo had simply been misleading, that men sometimes looked different in person than they did in pictures taken at flattering angles by people who loved them.

"I'm Lena," she said. "Lena Cole."

He looked at her for a moment longer than necessary. "Caiden Black."

That meant nothing to her, which she could tell surprised him slightly, the small flicker of a man unused to his own name landing without effect. Most people, she would later understand, reacted to it the way people react to a loud noise — immediate, involuntary recognition. Lena had spent the last three years working double shifts at a restaurant and a pharmacy and had not kept up with which billionaires were currently frightening people in this particular city.

"The service said we'd handle the paperwork today," he said, already reaching into his jacket. "I don't see the point in drawing these things out." He set a document on the table between them. "My grandmother's attorney prepared it. Standard terms. I've reviewed it already."

Lena looked at the document, then at him, then at the document again, and she should have said something — several things, starting with *I think there's been a mistake* and ending with *I'm going to find the correct room now* — but instead she looked at the clean professional lines of the paper, at the signature line waiting at the bottom, and she thought about her sister's husband's voice through the bedroom wall the night before. *She's twenty-four years old. She should have her own place. I'm not running a charity.* She thought about what it would mean to have her own place, finally, after three years of feeling like a guest in someone else's patience. She thought about what her aunt had said about Peter being stable, having resources, about not having to worry anymore.

She picked up the pen and signed it. He signed it without looking at her again. It was done in four minutes — a woman appeared, witnessed both signatures, collected the document with the brisk efficiency of someone who processed paperwork and nothing else, and left.

Lena sat across from the man she had apparently just married and thought: *I should probably tell him I'm not whoever he thinks I am.*

"Mr. Black," she said.

"Caiden is fine."

"Caiden." She folded her hands on the table, choosing her words with the same care she'd use approaching a customer mid-complaint at the restaurant. "I think there may have been a small misunderstanding."

He looked up from the phone he'd already returned his attention to. "What kind."

"The kind where I came through the wrong door," she said, "and I don't actually know who you were expecting, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't me."

The room went very quiet. Caiden Black set his phone down on the table with a precise, controlled movement that somehow communicated exactly how little he appreciated what she had just said. "You signed the document," he said.

"Yes."

"Your legal name."

"Yes."

"Then the marriage is registered." He picked his phone back up, already half-turned toward whatever was next in his day. "Whatever door you came through is irrelevant."

Lena stared at him. "We can't just— we don't know each other. We met eleven minutes ago."

"Twelve now." He stood, buttoning his jacket with the automatic efficiency of a man who had somewhere to be and had already allocated exactly enough time to this particular inconvenience. "My assistant will send you the details for the apartment. You can move in this week." He looked at her once more, the same assessing look as before, except this time something in it shifted slightly — not warmth, more like reluctant acknowledgment that he was looking at an actual person and not a line item. "Do you have dietary restrictions?"

"I— what?"

"The household chef needs to know."

Lena opened her mouth, then closed it, then said the only thing that came to her in the moment. "I don't eat mushrooms."

Caiden Black nodded once, as if this were a perfectly ordinary thing to discuss with a stranger he'd just married by clerical accident, and walked out of the room without another word.

Lena sat alone at the table in the restaurant she'd come to for a blind date with a man named Peter and looked at the empty space where her apparently-husband had been sitting thirty seconds earlier. Her phone buzzed. A text from her aunt: *How did it go with Peter? Did you like him?*

Lena looked at the message for a long time before she typed back: *It went fine. We got married.* She put the phone face down on the table and wondered how long she had before her aunt called, and whether that would be enough time to figure out what exactly she had just done.