CHAPTER 3

Megan's POV

The hospital wasted no time informing us of the news that we already feared. My mother needed surgery; her heart, the doctors said, had a blockage that had been building for years, waiting for precisely the type of shock that she had been put through that morning to finally announce itself.

I sat in the hallway outside her room for a long while after they told me, staring at nothing, running the math in my head over and over again, no matter how many times it came out the same. We didn't have it. Not close to it. Every last coin we had ever managed to find was swallowed up by a debt that seemed to never shrink no matter how much we fed it.

I don't remember deciding to reach into my bag. I remember only that my fingers found the card first — the one I'd shoved in there absentmindedly, still meaning to return it to whoever it belonged to once things had settled down.

Mr. Arian Carusso.

I turned it over twice, reading his name printed there in neat, embossed letters, feeling something dark and desperate twist in my chest. He didn't know me. He wouldn't notice a fraction of what it would cost for a surgery like this. He'd more than likely forgotten the card even existed, and replaced it already by the time I'd got back with a new one in hand.

I told myself this over and over again as I walked up to the billing desk, my hands shaking so badly that I had to place the card down twice before the woman behind the counter could take it from me.

"This should cover the deposit for the surgery," I said at last, my voice barely steadying. "My mother, Vanessa Valtz."

I don't remember much after that. I remember signing something. I remember being sent away. I remember sitting back down outside my mother's room, for the first time all day able to breathe, all the while a wave of nausea washing over me at what I'd just done.

It did not take long for it to catch up with me.

My mother woke up the next morning, groggy but alert, and the first words out of her mouth were not about how she felt or what day it was but rather a question about how we had paid for the surgery. She took my hand in hers, her voice still thick with the anesthesia, and asked me if the deposit had already been paid.

"Megan, the nurse just told me that the deposit was already covered before they took me into surgery. We don't have that kind of money. Where did it come from?"

I had prepared a speech the entire night, sitting in that godforsaken hospital room, but the words that came out of my mouth were not nearly as eloquent as the carefully crafted monologues I had perfected in my head.

"The guy who helped us out at the shop, Mr. Carusso, he paid for it. He said it was the least he could do considering what happened that day."

It wasn't technically a lie, just embellished enough to make me feel physically ill in the wake of her response.

"That's very generous of him," she said, her tone not one of skepticism exactly but more of surprise. "I suppose we should pay him back somehow."

"I'm already on it," I replied, which, in a technical sense, wasn't one bit of a lie either.

She seemed content to drop the subject, too tired to press for any real answers, and I assured myself that I would think of some way to explain the rest of it all to her before she found out about the rest of it on her own. I just hadn't anticipated finding out about the wedding in the next forty-eight hours either.

Two days later, while my mother was at our small apartment still recovering, still alive, still here, a black car pulled up outside our shop. I was behind the counter again, trying once more to force myself back into some semblance of normality, when the bell rang, and I looked up to see him.

Arian Carusso, in the flesh, looking just as cold and unreadable as he had the day I had watched him make two grown men flinch simply by speaking.

"Miss Valtz," he said, and the way he said my name told me everything. He already knew.

My stomach twisted at the sound of it. "Mr. Carusso, I—"

"Do you have any idea," he said, voice low and controlled in a way that was somehow worse than if he'd shouted, "what it looks like for an unauthorized charge for a hospital surgery to appear on my card, made by a name my security team had to work to identify? I had two options this morning, Miss Valtz. To report it as fraud, or to come here myself and ask you exactly what you had thought you were doing."

"I was going to pay it back," I said, even though I had no idea how I ever intended to, though the words tasted like a lie the second they left my mouth. "I swear, I never meant to steal from you. You dropped it that day — at the shop — when you came to help my mother. I found it in her blanket in the ambulance. I panicked. She needed surgery, and I didn't have anyone else to—"

"So you decided that a stranger's credit card was an acceptable solution."

"I know how it sounds."

"Do you?" His eyes were sharp, slicing through every defense I tried to offer with a blade that had not been tempered in mercy. "Because from where I'm standing, it sounds like theft, fraud, the whole lot of it. The kind of thing that ends with police involvement, not an apology."

My blood ran cold. "Please. My mother just had surgery. If you report this, if she finds out I—"

"I'm aware of exactly what is at stake for you, Miss Valtz. That's precisely why I am here, as opposed to having already made the call."

Something in the way he said it told me to look up properly, to look past my anger, and for the first time that I could remember, notice that he had not, in fact, threatened to call anyone yet. That he was still here. Still talking. If he had ever truly wanted me arrested, I would not doubt he would have driven here himself to tell me so.

"What do you want?" I asked quietly.

He studied me for a long while, something unfurling behind his eyes, calculation perhaps, or the look of a man who had just found the answer to a problem he had not believed himself to be solved in any place other than here, of all things.

"I have a proposition," he said finally. "One that will solve your problem, and, it happens, one of mine."

"What kind of proposition?"

"Marry me. One year. A contract, nothing more. In exchange, the debt disappears, this morning's little incident disappears, and your mother's medical bills stop being something you have to lie awake calculating at three in the morning."

I stared at him, sure I'd heard wrong. "You're joking."

"I don't have the time to joke, Miss Valtz. I have five days left to convince a board of directors that I'm not a liability, and you, as of two days ago, are in no position to refuse favors from strangers." His voice was even, businesslike, like he was asking a woman he had known for nothing other than the two encounters that they had had to become his wife. "You have until tomorrow morning to decide. After that, I go back to considering my other options."

He did not wait for an answer. He turned, walked back to his car, and left me standing there, in the middle of my mother's shop, the bell above the door still swinging, and my entire life balanced on a decision I had less than a day to make.