CHAPTER 8

Elena's POV

I said no.

I went home that night, lay on my thin mattress in my small Millbrook apartment, stared at the water-stained ceiling, and talked myself out of it.

Because it was crazy. The whole thing was crazy. Pretending to be engaged to Alexander St. James? A man I didn't know? A man whose entire public persona was built on being intimidating, cold, and impossible to get close to?

No. Absolutely not.

I had enough complications. I was pregnant and hiding that pregnancy. I was trying to get a divorce from a man who hadn't signed anything. I was working a bakery job that paid barely enough to cover rent and food. Adding a fake engagement to a rival hockey captain into that mix was not a solution. It was like a second disaster piling on top of the first one.

I was not going to do it. I rolled over, pulled my blanket tighter, and went to sleep. I stayed decided for exactly eleven days, eleven days before everything fell apart at once.

It started with Miss Clara.

She called me into the back of the bakery on a Tuesday morning. Her face looked uncomfortable in a way I had never seen before. She was usually warm, expressive, loud with her laughter. But that morning she sat me down across from her at the small wooden table she used as a desk and she couldn't meet my eyes.

"Elena, honey, I don't know how to say this except to just say it." She exhaled slowly. "I have to let you go."

My heart sank. "What?"

"I got a call yesterday. Someone reached out to the bakery, pretending to be a health inspector at first, and then when that didn't land anywhere, they just...." She pressed her lips together. "They implied some very nasty things about you that you were involved in some kind of scandal and that you were connected to an ongoing investigation." She finally looked at me. "I don't believe any of it, sweetheart but I have a business to run and I can't afford the kind of trouble that follows..."

"It's okay." I heard my own voice from somewhere very far away. "I understand."

"Elena—"

"It's okay, Miss Clara."

I picked up my apron from the hook on the wall and folded it neatly and left it on the table. Then I walked out the back door because I didn't trust myself to walk through the front of the bakery without falling apart.

I sat on the curb behind the building for ten minutes just breathing. Damien. This had Damien's fingerprints all over it.

I should have known he wouldn't just let me leave quietly. He wasn't built that way. Damien Volkov didn't lose things, he just punished them for trying to belong to themselves.

I walked home counting my money. I had enough for six more weeks of rent if I was very, very careful. After that, nothing.

I decided to call Patricia Cole concerning the divorce. "The divorce proceedings have stalled," she told me carefully. "Damien's legal team has filed several objections and delays. At this rate, we're looking at months, possibly longer."

"Can he legally do that? Just drag it out indefinitely?"

"With the team of lawyers he has? He can drag it out for quite a while." She paused. "Elena, I have to be honest with you. He hasn't signed the papers and unless there's some significant shift in the balance of power, he has every financial and legal advantage in this situation."

Balance of power. I thought about that phrase for a long time after I hung up.

I sat on my kitchen floor, because the chair was uncomfortable and the floor was oddly grounding, and I thought about my options.

I had no job. My savings were disappearing. My pregnancy was eleven weeks along and I had missed my last prenatal appointment because I couldn't afford it. Damien was stalling the divorce. Damien had gotten me fired. And somewhere out there, two men had been sent to rough me up in an alley.

Who sent those men? Was that Damien too? Or was it Georgina?

My phone buzzed.

An unknown number. I picked it up, already knowing somehow.

"Have you thought about it?" Three words. No greeting. No name. No explanation needed.

I looked around my small apartment. The leaking tap that the landlord hadn't fixed. The single bare bulb in the kitchen and the crackers on the counter because that was dinner.

I typed back slowly asking the whole reason for all these.

Three dots. Then: "Meet me tomorrow. Same restaurant. Seven o'clock."

I stared at the message then I typed back. Fine.

He was already there when I arrived. Same table, same stillness. But this time, when I sat down, something was different. He looked at me for a long moment, and then, without any preamble, he said something I hadn't expected.

"I have a younger sister."

I blinked. Of everything I thought he might open with, that was not it.

"Her name is Jemima," he continued. His voice was flat and controlled, but there was something underneath it that cost him something to say. "She's fifteen. She's been living with our mother for the past three years and I have been trying to get her out."

I said nothing, i just listened.

"My mother has a drug problem. It has been a problem for most of my life. The courts have been aware of it but when I applied for custody of Jemima, the judge denied it." His jaw tightened slightly. "The reason given was that my life is too unstable too public. Too..." he paused on the word as though it tasted bad, "—unpredictable for a minor."

Something ached behind my ribs.

"If I had a partner," he said carefully, "a stable domestic arrangement, the court's position would change. That is what I was told, directly, by my attorney."

I looked at him across the table. The cold, powerful, terrifying Alexander St. James sitting here telling me about his fifteen-year-old sister and a custody battle and a mother who wasn't well.

The image didn't match the reputation at all.

"How long would you need the arrangement to last?" I asked quietly.

"Two years. Until Jemima turns eighteen and the custody question becomes irrelevant."

I was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully, I said, "I need you to know something before this goes any further."

His eyes held mine, steady and waiting. I pressed my hands flat on the table. My heart was hammering but my voice came out even.

"I'm pregnant," I said. "Eleven weeks. Damien's child."

Silence.

Alexander didn't move. His expression didn't crack. He just looked at me with those unreadable gray eyes and said nothing for a long, stretched-out moment.

Then, quietly: "I know."

My blood went cold, "What did you just say?"

"I said I know." He held my gaze. "Elena, there are things about this situation that you don't fully understand yet. Things I will explain when the time is right but my offer stands, regardless of the pregnancy. It changes nothing for me."

I stared at him. My mind was spinning.

He knew. He already knew about the baby which meant he had known more about me than he let on from the very beginning. Now finding out how much Alexander St. James knew about my life and how long he had been watching it was suddenly and terrifyingly relevant.

"Who are you really?" I whispered.

He reached into his jacket and slid a folded document across the table toward me.

"Read this first," he said quietly. "Then decide."

I looked down at the document. My name was already on it, my full name. Elena Grace Brooks.

And when I opened it and read the first line, my heart nearly stopped completely.