CHAPTER 3: THE PROPOSAL

Temi almost said no.

She stood in the hallway outside the Peregrine's rooftop bar for a full minute, phone in hand, thumb hovering over the reply button, running through every reasonable version of herself that would tell Adrian Voss she was going home to sleep off the worst night of her best friend's life instead of meeting a near stranger for a private conversation at eleven o'clock at night.

But Camille's text was still sitting in her inbox, unanswered. Please tell his family whatever you need to. And someone had to be in that room representing the version of events that wasn't a scandal, wasn't a headline, wasn't whatever the tabloids were about to make of a runaway bride and a jilted billionaire. Temi told herself that was the reason she typed back yes and headed for the elevator.

She mostly believed it.

The bar Adrian had chosen was a private one, tucked behind an unmarked door two floors below the rooftop, the kind of place that didn't have a name on the outside because the people who needed to know where it was already knew. A bartender who didn't ask questions handed her a glass of something amber she hadn't ordered and disappeared through a side door, leaving her alone with Adrian in a corner booth lit low enough that most of his face sat in shadow.

He'd taken off his jacket. His tie hung loose around his open collar, and for the first time all evening he looked less like a man performing composure and more like a man who had simply run out of the energy required to keep doing it.

"Thank you for coming," he said.

"I don't know what I can tell you that helps," Temi said, sliding into the booth across from him. "I haven't heard from her since the text."

"I'm not asking about Camille."

That stopped her.

"Then what am I doing here?"

Adrian was quiet for a moment, turning his own untouched glass in slow half circles on the table. When he finally spoke, he sounded like a man reading terms off a contract he'd already decided to sign, careful, deliberate, no room left for improvisation.

"My grandfather's will has a clause," he said. "I assume you've gathered that much from tonight."

"I gathered there's a clause. Nobody's told me what it says."

"I have sixty days to be married, with an heir confirmed on the way, or I lose controlling interest in Voss Industries to a board my father would very quickly take over." He said it flatly, like reciting a fact he'd made peace with a long time ago, even though the muscle in his jaw told a different story. "My grandfather is dying. He wanted to see the company stay in responsible hands before he goes. He decided marriage was proof of responsibility. I didn't design the test. I only have to pass it."

Temi sat back against the booth, the strange amber drink forgotten in front of her. "And Camille was supposed to be the proof."

"Camille was supposed to be a lot of things," Adrian said, and something in his voice, for the first time all night, cracked just slightly at the seams. "I don't know what happened tonight. I don't think I'm going to know for a while. But the clock on the will doesn't care what happened. It started sixty days ago whether I had a bride or not."

Temi did the math without meaning to. If tonight was any indication of the timeline, that left him barely more than a month.

"I still don't understand why I'm here," she said, even though some small, unwelcome part of her already suspected.

Adrian looked at her directly then, the shadows in the booth doing nothing to soften whatever was in his expression. Calculation, maybe. Or desperation dressed up as calculation, which she was starting to realize might be the only way a man like this let himself feel desperate at all.

"I need a wife," he said. "Within the next several weeks. I need an heir confirmed not long after that. I need someone who understands, going in, that this isn't a love match. It's a contract. Clear terms. A settlement at the end large enough that walking away afterward is worth whatever inconvenience the arrangement causes along the way."

Temi's stomach dropped somewhere near her borrowed heels.

"You're asking me to marry you."

"I'm asking you to consider it."

"Adrian." She said his first name for the first time all night, and it felt strange in her mouth, too intimate for a conversation this clinical. "I was your fiancée's maid of honor four hours ago. This is insane."

"It is," he agreed, with no apology in it at all. "I'm aware of exactly how insane it sounds. I'm also aware that I have sixty, now closer to fifty five, days to solve a problem that most people would need years to solve honestly, and I don't have years. I have a company employing eleven thousand people that my father would gut within a fiscal quarter if he got his hands on it. I have a grandfather who deserves to die believing the thing he built will outlive him intact. And I have, as of about ninety minutes ago, no bride."

"So find someone else. There are a hundred women in this city who'd say yes to that offer before you finished the sentence."

"There probably are," Adrian said. "But I don't trust most of them not to leak the terms to a tabloid the second the ink is dry, and I don't have time to vet strangers. I know you. Not well. But I know Camille trusted you with everything, which tells me something about your character that background checks can't." He paused. "And I heard what you told Sable tonight. About your studio."

Temi went very still.

"That's not your business."

"You're right. It isn't. But you said, and I quote, that you'd rather lose a limb than lose the lease on that brownstone, and you said it like a woman who's watched something she built come apart slowly enough to know exactly what that feels like." His eyes didn't waver from hers. "I'm offering a settlement that would clear whatever's threatening that lease and then some. I'm not naive enough to think that erases how strange this is. I'm only telling you it's on the table."

Temi opened her mouth to say something sharp, something about how dare you, how this isn't how people talk to each other, how grief doesn't come with a business proposal attached. But the numbers were already moving through her head whether she wanted them to or not. The past due notice from her landlord folded into thirds in her desk drawer. The two junior architects she'd have to let go by the end of the quarter if the Whitmore contract didn't come through. Pri's face last week, trying so hard to sound optimistic while going over the books, failing.

"You don't even know if I'd say yes to the parts that matter," Temi said, quieter now. "The heir. All of it. That's not a business line item, Adrian. That's a child."

"I know," he said, and for the first time, something in his voice sounded almost human, almost afraid. "I'm not asking you to decide tonight."

He reached into his jacket, still draped over the seat beside him, and pulled out a single folded sheet of paper. Not a full contract. Just an outline, she realized as he slid it across the table, terms written in plain, careful language instead of legalese, like he'd drafted it himself in the last ninety minutes rather than handing the job to his lawyer.

"Read it when you're ready," he said. "Take as long as you need. Within reason."

Temi looked down at the paper without touching it, her own name typed at the top of the page in a spot that, until four hours ago, had belonged to somebody else entirely.

She was still staring at it, unmoving, when her phone lit up on the table between them with a new text.

Not from Camille.

From her landlord.

FINAL NOTICE, the subject line read. RESPOND BY END OF WEEK OR PROCEEDINGS WILL BEGIN.

Temi looked up from the screen, and found Adrian watching her with the quiet, terrible patience

of a man who already knew, before she did, exactly what her answer was going to be.