chapter 2

Point of View: Alexander

"Find her, sign her, and make certain the press believes this is love," I said, "because the one thing my grandfather's will did not account for is how little I care what anyone believes."

Daniel did not look up from his tablet. In eleven years working for me he had learned that my worst moods sounded exactly like my best ones, flat and quiet, and that the only safe response to either was to keep working.

"The lawyers already drafted the confidentiality clause," he said. "Nobody outside this floor will ever see the real terms. To the world, Elena Hart married you because she wanted to."

"And to her father."

"Debt forgiven. Firm saved. Clean."

I looked out over Manhattan from the fortieth floor of a building with my name on it, a name my grandfather had built out of one failing motel by the highway and forty years of refusing to lose. In eleven days I would turn thirty three. In eleven days, if I was not married, every share he had ever earned would pass to my cousin Marcus, who had spent the last decade waiting for exactly this kind of clerical accident to hand him a company he had never once had to build.

I did not intend to give him the satisfaction.

Marcus called forty minutes before she was due to arrive, his voice doing the thing it always did when he thought he already had the win in hand, warm on top and hollow underneath.

"I hear you found yourself a bride," he said. "How resourceful. Grandfather would be so moved."

"Is there a reason you're calling."

"Only to remind you the board meets in two weeks whether you're married or not, and paper marriages have a way of falling apart under the right kind of pressure. I'd hate to see you humiliated twice in one lifetime."

I hung up without answering. Twice in one lifetime meant Vanessa, and Marcus knew exactly which door he was knocking on when he said it. I sat with that for a moment longer than I intended, my thumb finding the edge of my sister's watch on my wrist the way it always did when something old tried to climb back up my throat. Claire had been the only person who ever told me my temper was a door, not a wall, that I could open it if I chose to. I had not chosen to in ten years.

Elena Hart arrived at nine exactly, which told me more about her than the file Daniel had prepared. Most people I brought into this office arrived either ten minutes early to prove their eagerness or ten minutes late to prove their importance. She arrived on the second, wearing a gray coat that had seen better winters, holding herself like someone braced for a blow she refused to flinch from before it landed.

"Mr. Sterling," she said, and did not offer her hand.

"Ms. Hart. Sit."

"I would rather stand while you explain why my father's debt is apparently a business opportunity for you."

I respected that more than I expected to. I gestured to the contract already laid across the glass table between us, the same clauses Daniel and I had spent three sleepless nights building.

"Eighteen months," I said. "You live in my residence. You appear at the events my calendar requires. In exchange, your father's firm is solvent, his name is clear, and neither of us has to explain the real terms to a single living person for the length of the marriage."

"Why the secrecy."

"Because a business marriage announced as a business marriage invites a board vote asking whether my judgment can be trusted with anything else. A marriage the world believes is real invites nothing. It is simpler to be believed than to be questioned."

She read the confidentiality clause twice, the way I had watched my own lawyers read it, looking for the loophole that was not there.

"So I become a lie you tell in public."

"You become the reason a company survives and the reason your father's firm does too. Call it whatever helps you sign it."

Something moved behind her eyes then, quick and sharp, gone before I could name it. Not fear. Something closer to fury held very carefully in check, which was, I would come to learn, the exact temperature of most things Elena Hart felt.

"I have conditions of my own," she said.

Nobody had told me she would have conditions. Nobody had told me because nobody had expected them, least of all me.

"I'm listening."

"My work at the firm does not stop. I finish the projects I have started, on my own schedule, without your assistants managing my calendar like I am one of your hotels. And whatever this is, in front of your cameras, stays in front of your cameras. It does not follow me into any room you are not required to be photographed in."

I almost smiled. I stopped myself before it reached my face, an old habit built over ten years of never letting anyone see the exact moment something surprised me.

"Agreed," I said.

She signed without reading it a third time, which surprised me more than the conditions had. Most people in her position would have stalled, would have wept, would have asked for one more day to think. She simply took the pen Daniel offered, wrote her name in handwriting sharper than I expected, and set the pen down like she was setting down a weapon she intended to pick back up later.

"One more thing," I said, before she reached the door. "The wedding is in six days. My grandmother's ring will be delivered to you tomorrow. Wear it."

She turned in the doorway, coat still buttoned, eyes steady in a way that made the whole room feel smaller than it had a minute ago.

"You didn't ask if I like rings, Mr. Sterling."

"No," I said. "I didn't."

"Then you should know now, before this goes any further. I don't do anything I'm only told to do. Not even for eighteen million dollars of forgiven debt."

I sat alone after she left, turning her signature over in my mind the way I turned over a bad clause in a contract, looking for the trick in it and finding none. In eleven years of running this company I had negotiated with men who owned airlines and men who owned governments, and not one of them had walked out of this office having gotten the last word.

She had.

The door had barely closed when Daniel knocked twice and let himself back in, tablet already glowing with the next fire that needed putting out.

"Marcus filed something with the board this afternoon," he said. "A formal request to review the marriage's validity before the deadline. He's not waiting for the wedding to start looking for the seams."

"Then we make certain there are none for him to find."

Daniel hesitated in the doorway the way he only ever did when the news was worse than he wanted to lead with.

"There's one more thing. The photographer we hired for the engagement announcement. He says he recognizes her. Says he's shot her before, at a masked charity gala last spring, though he can't place the account it was billed to."

"It doesn't matter," I told him. "Half of Manhattan was photographed at that gala. Whoever he thinks he recognizes, Elena Hart was never anywhere near my side of that ballroom."

I did not believe a single word of it, and Daniel, who had known me eleven years, did not believe I believed it either.