Chapter Three

Furina didn’t even have time to catch her breath before he folded himself into the seat beside her and pulled the door shut. He said something to the driver in rapid French, and the car slid away from the steps of her mother's house.

"Wait. Wait, wait. Where are we going?" Her plan had been to hide for thirty seconds until her mother gave up and went back inside. It had not involved the door shutting, or the car moving.

"Around," said the man, without a smile.

"Around?"

He spared her a glance before returning to his phone. "Around and about."

"No. I need to get out." Furina closed her eyes and took a slow breath. "I'm really sorry for barging into your car like this. I was trying to avoid someone. If you could stop, I'll get out of your hair."

He put the phone away and shifted to face her. "Are you well?"

"No. I mean, yes." She shook her head, as if that might shake loose the mess inside it.

He went quiet for a heartbeat. His eyes, a pale, icy blue, moved over her face before settling on hers. "You don't look well. How can I help to make it better?"

On any other night she would have told him she didn't need his help, and that she'd much prefer it if he let her out of the damn car. But tonight, without even closing her eyes, she could see her dad's bruised face and split lip.

How can I help to make it better? Not one soul had ever asked her that. People asked what was wrong. Nobody ever asked what would help.

She looked at him properly then. The jaw. The mouth. The voice she'd last heard through a bedroom door in Paris.

"You don't remember me, do you?"

He studied her for a long moment, his expression unreadable. "I meet a great many people."

Of course he did. Heat crawled up her neck. For four years she'd occasionally fantasised about throttling this man, and he didn't even remember her face. Fine. She wasn't going to remind him.

Maybe it was desperation, or maybe the evening had knocked something loose in her head, but she heard herself say, "If you could lend me one and a half million pounds, that'd really help."

To her astonishment, he nodded. "Sure. Give me your bank account number."

Furina waited for him to laugh. His face stayed dead serious. "You're taking the piss, right?"

He frowned. "No. I don't need the bathroom."

She shook her head. Evidently not from the UK; he wouldn't know the slang. "I mean, you're joking."

"No." He took a slim notebook and a pen from inside his jacket and held them out. "Write your account number, and I will wire the funds."

She didn't take them. "If you're not joking, why would you give that much money to a stranger?"

"I don't give it to you. I lend it to you, no?"

"Yes, but still. How would you know I could pay it back? I mean, look at me."

"I am looking."

Furina narrowed her eyes. "If you think I'll sleep with you, or do anything weird, just because you lent me money, you're dead wrong."

His eyebrow twitched. It was the only reaction she got to calling him a pervert. "If I need someone to sleep with me, it won't require money." He turned to a blank page, wrote IOU across the top in a neat, slanted hand, and gave it back. "You can sign that, under your account number."

The whole thing was so absurd she didn't believe a word of it, but she wrote down her account number anyway. She left the space for her signature empty. "I'm not signing anything until I see the money."

"Femme intelligente," he murmured.

He reached for his phone, and she leaned back and looked out of the window. They'd pulled over on a quiet road at the edge of the Heath. People strolled along the pavement, laughing, holding hands, carrying takeaway bags. They looked as if they had nothing on their shoulders at all. Her life had been like that, once. Not easy, but manageable.

"You know," she said quietly, not sure if she was talking to him or to herself, "just when I'd got used to life being normal, it went and turned itself upside down."

She'd never have said that to a stranger. Then again, she'd never have dived into a stranger's car, either. Tonight, apparently, she was a different person.

"Check your account," he said. "The funds should be there."

"Right." She rolled her eyes. "Look, this has been fun, but I have to go." Her hand found the door handle, but a light touch on her elbow stopped her.

"Check your balance," was all he said.

The sooner she humoured him, the sooner she could leave. She opened her banking app expecting nothing.

The balance had seven digits.

It took her a long time to lift her eyes to his. "How?"

"C'est comme ça." He lifted one shoulder. "It just is."

He picked up the pen and held it out to her, his face perfectly composed. "Ready to sign now?" 

Vince Draper smirked when the transfer landed on Sunday morning. They were in a greasy café on the Lea Bridge Road, her father white as paper beside her, and Draper checked his phone twice before he tossed the paperwork across the table like a beer mat.

"Someone's got friends," he said.

Furina didn't answer. She took her father's arm and walked him out into the drizzle, and she didn't let herself cry until he was safely in bed.

At eight on Monday morning, a text arrived from a number she didn't know.

Ashcombe Capital, Canary Wharf, 10 a.m. We have terms to discuss. — R. Ashcombe

So that was his name. She looked him up on the Tube and found almost nothing. Rafe Ashcombe, twenty-nine, founder of a private investment firm. A Forbes Thirty Under Thirty listing with no photograph. A handful of blurry pictures from charity dinners, and not one interview. One of the tabloids had given up and called him the mystery billionaire.

She leaned against the wall of the platform at Canary Wharf, waiting for her nerves to settle. They didn't. Terms. She'd known the money came with strings. She just hadn't let herself wonder how thick they'd be.

The building was a sleek column of glass that made everything around it look shabby. Inside, the floors were polished to a mirror shine, and a young receptionist with sharp glasses looked up without smiling.

"Name?"

"Furina. Um, Furina Dunne. I'm here to see Mr Ashcombe."

The receptionist's fingers flew across her keyboard. "Twenty-fifth floor. Mr Ashcombe is expecting you."

The lift was mirrored, and Furina's reflection looked back at her from four sides, pale and unconvinced. When the doors opened, she stepped into an office with floor-to-ceiling windows and the whole of London laid out behind a huge desk. He was standing behind it.

"Ms Dunne," he said. "Thank you for coming."

"Mr Ashcombe." She kept her voice steady. "You said we had terms to discuss."

He gestured to the chair opposite. "Please. Sit."

She sat. He did too, and folded his hands on the desk. In daylight his eyes were even paler, and they made her feel like a spreadsheet he was checking for errors.

"I'll be direct," he said. "I don't need the money back."

She blinked. "Sorry?"

"Not in money. I need a wife." He said it the way other people said I need a coffee. "On paper."

Furina stared at him. "Marry you? On paper? Why?"

"My grandfather left a condition in his will. I must be married before my thirtieth birthday."

"And when's that?"

"Friday."

"This Friday?"

"This Friday." He went on as if reading from a menu. "Three years. We live separately. You keep your life; I keep mine. You appear with me when appearances are required. At the end of three years, a quiet divorce, and the loan is forgiven in full."

"And if I say no?"

"Then you repay the one and a half million."

Her stomach dropped through the floor. Every penny had gone to Vince Draper yesterday morning. And from the calm way he was watching her, he'd known it would.

"And if I say yes," she said slowly, "and then I want out early?"

He slid a single page across the desk and touched a paragraph with one finger. "Twice the loan."

"Three million pounds?" Her voice cracked. "That's insane."

"That," he said, "is the price of my certainty."

Before life had turned her into a waitress, Furina had spent four years learning to read balance sheets, and this one didn't balance. A man like him could find a wife by Friday without lifting a finger. Half of London would queue round the block. So why a bartender from Walthamstow he claimed not to remember?

"Why me?"

"You needed money. I need a wife by Friday. The arithmetic is simple."

It wasn't. But she was out of options, and they both knew it.

"Then I have conditions too," she said. "My life stays mine. My jobs, my friends, my flat. I'm not moving in with you, and I am not sleeping with you."

"I didn't ask for any of that."

"Then put it in writing."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "Of course."

Within the hour she was in a small conference room with him, a silver-haired lawyer, and a compact man with a soldier's haircut whom Rafe introduced only as Callum. The documents were straightforward: a marriage, and a private agreement setting out its terms. Her conditions had been typed in as clause seven.

She reached for the pen, and her eyes snagged on the first line of the agreement.

Between Furina Dunne and Rafe Ashcombe Vauclair.

Vauclair.

The name had been embossed in gold on the invitation she'd found in her father's wrecked kitchen. Mrs Orla Vauclair.

"Vauclair," she said. Her own voice sounded far away. "As in Antoine Vauclair?"

For a moment, nobody in the room moved.

Then Rafe said, "Does it change your answer?"

She looked down at the pen in her hand. She thought of her father on his knees, picking up glass. The money, gone. Five days that had shrunk to no days at all.

She signed.

"We fly to Gibraltar at two," Rafe said, rising and buttoning his jacket. "The registrar will marry us tomorrow morning by special licence."

"Gibraltar?" Furina said faintly. "Like John Lennon?"

Behind him, Callum's mouth twitched.

Gibraltar was a blur of wind and white paint, and a registrar with reading glasses on a chain. Callum and a woman from the hotel signed as witnesses. Rafe said his vows in a flat, even voice, like a man reading terms and conditions. Furina said hers like a woman who could no longer feel her hands. He slid a plain platinum band onto her finger, and it fitted, which bothered her more than she could explain.

When the registrar smiled and said, "You may now—" Rafe said, "That won't be necessary," and Furina honestly didn't know whether she was relieved or insulted.

The photographers were waiting on the steps outside. She didn't understand how — nobody knew they were here — but Rafe put a hand at the small of her back and steered her through the flashes to the car as if he'd been expecting them.

By ten that night she was back on Lizzy's sofa in Camden: a married woman, with a ring she hadn't chosen and a husband who'd dropped her at the kerb.

"Thank you for your cooperation," he'd said.

"This isn't what I pictured for my life," she'd told him through the open window.

"No," he'd agreed. "We'll make it as painless as possible."

Then the car had pulled away, and she'd stood on the pavement turning the ring round and round, wondering what exactly she'd traded her old problems for. 

---

The next morning, her phone woke her. She never put it on silent in case her dad needed her, and now it wouldn't stop buzzing. She fumbled for it on the bedside table, yawning, and stopped.

Notifications. Hundreds of them. She scrolled with a trembling thumb through article after article, each headline louder than the last, until one stopped her cold.

MYSTERY BILLIONAIRE WEDS HIS STEPSISTER

There was a knock at her door. Lizzy stood there in her dressing gown, holding a stack of newspapers. "F*e," she said gently. "You need to see these."

"Not now, Liz."

"Yes, now." Lizzy came in and laid the papers on the duvet.

The top one was a tabloid. KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY, it screamed, over a photograph of Furina and Rafe on the registry steps, his hand at her back. Beside it was a picture of her mother at some gala, impossibly polished, captioned society hostess Orla Vauclair, who married billionaire Antoine Vauclair four years ago. The article had a great deal to say about the bride being the hostess's daughter. It used the word incest four times.

Her phone buzzed again. A message from her mother: Call me NOW.

Furina took a breath and dialled. Her mother answered on the first ring, her voice strained to breaking.

"Furina! How could you do this to us? Marrying my son, behind my back?"

My son. The words went in like a splinter. The son she'd got by marriage, while the daughter she'd given birth to stood on the other end of the line.

"Have you any idea what this means for my family?"

My family. As though Furina had never been part of it.

"You ungrateful girl! On Saturday I offered you a room in my home!" Orla's voice climbed. "You and your father are both useless!"

The line went dead.

Furina stared at the phone. Lizzy, who had heard every word, sat down on the edge of the bed. "You need to talk to him," she said. "He's the only one who can explain this."

This time Furina didn't wait for the receptionist. She went straight up to the twenty-fifth floor and pushed open his door. He was at his desk, reading, and he didn't look up.

"You knew who I was."

"Good morning to you, too."

"You knew exactly who I was. That's why you were at her house on Saturday. That's why you didn't blink at one and a half million pounds." Her voice was shaking, and she hated it. "You married me because of her."

He set down his pen. "And if I did?"

"Then I want to know why! Is this some sick game to humiliate my mother? Do you know what they're calling us? They're calling it incest!"

"We're not related, and we never lived under the same roof. The papers will move on."

"You don't get to be calm about this!"

To her astonishment, he laughed: a low, quiet sound that ran down her spine like a fingertip. "C'est là que tu as tort." That's where you're wrong. He rose and slid his hands into his pockets. "I don't have to explain anything to you, chérie. You signed a legally binding agreement. There's no way out, I'm afraid."

Before she could answer, the door opened behind her.

A tall woman in a red dress stepped in, and Furina recognised her at once: Cressida Vane, from the society pages, from every glossy magazine in every waiting room she'd ever sat in. In half of those pictures, she'd been on Rafe Ashcombe's arm.

"Oops," Cressida said, all honey and vowels. "Am I interrupting?"

"What are you doing here, Cressida?" Rafe's voice was cold, but Furina saw his shoulders set.

"We have unfinished business, darling. Remember?" Cressida's gaze slid over Furina and found her wanting. "But I see you're busy."

"We were finishing," Rafe said.

"Lovely." Cressida raised one perfect eyebrow.

Furina lifted her chin, looked at neither of them, and walked out. The silence she left behind followed her all the way to the lift.