Chapter 2

The Man Behind The Contract

Vivienne didn't sleep that night. She sat on the floor of her studio at 2 a.m, surrounded by half-finished restorations and the folder Damian had given her, the foreclosure email glowing on her phone screen like an accusation. Renata had come and gone twice, bringing coffee, bringing wine, finally giving up on both and just sitting beside her on the cold floor in silence, which helped more than either drink had. "You have to call him," Renata said, for the tenth time. And say what? 'Hey, nice to meet you, your lawyers are trying to take my building on the same day you told me I had a week to think?"

"Yes," Renata said. "Exactly that. Word for word if you want."

By eight in the morning, Vivienne was standing outside Voss Enterprises again, unshowered, furious, the folder crushed under one arm, and this time she didn't wait to be announced. She walked straight past his assistant's desk.

"Ma'am, you can't"

"Watch me."

Damian looked up from his desk when she shoved the door open, and for exactly one second, something crossed his face that looked almost like relief, gone so fast she decided she'd imagined it.

"Ms. Marsh."

"Your lawyers filed foreclosure paperwork on my studio yesterday," Vivienne said, slamming her phone down on his desk, the email still open. You told me I had until Friday. Damian's jaw tightened. He picked up the phone, read it once, then read it again slower, and something dark moved behind his eyes.

"This wasn't authorized by me," he said quietly.

"That's convenient."

"It's the truth." He was already reaching for his own phone, dialing before she'd finished her sentence. "Adler. My office. Now." He hung up without waiting for an answer, and turned back to Vivienne, and for the first time since she'd met him, he looked less like a CEO and more like a man who'd just found out someone had lied to him under his own name. "I'm sorry. This should never have happened." Sorry doesn't undo an eviction notice.

"No," he agreed. "It doesn't. But I can undo the eviction notice itself, and I'm going to, in the next ten minutes, whether you decide to sign my contract or not."

That stopped her.

"What?"

"You heard me." He sat back down, rubbing a hand across his jaw, tired in a way she hadn't expected from a man who looked like he owned the whole city from up here. "I'm not going to force your hand by threatening to take your studio, Ms. Marsh. If my lawyer did that without my knowledge, that's on me, not you, and I'm going to fix it regardless of what you decide." Vivienne stood there, breathing hard, waiting for the trick, the fine print, the catch. It didn't come. "Why," she said slowly, would you fix a problem that gets you what you want?

Something flickered behind his eye, surprise maybe, that she'd asked the question at all.

"Because I don't want a wife who signs a contract because she's terrified," he said. "I want a wife who signs it because she's decided it's the smartest move available to her. Those are two very different women, and I'd rather have the second kind sitting across from a board of directors for the next eighteen months. The door opened. Ms. Adler stepped in, folder in hand, looking distinctly less confident than she had the day before.

"Fix it," Damian said, without looking at her. "All of it. Today."

"Sir, the filing was already done"

"I said today."

Ms. Adler left without another word.

Vivienne sank into the chair across from him, suddenly exhausted, the anger draining out of her all at once, leaving something rawer behind it.

I don't understand you, she admitted.

"Most people don't," Damian said. "It's usually easier that way."

They sat in silence for a while. Outside his window, the city moved on the way it always did, cars and people and lives that had nothing to do with the strange, impossible thing sitting on the table between them. Tell me something true, Vivienne said finally. Not a business answer. Something real.

Damian studied her for a long moment, like he was deciding whether the question was safe to answer.

"My uncle raised me," he said. "Not my parents, they were never really around. He died in a car accident when I was twenty-two, the same month I was supposed to take over running this company with him. I buried him, and then I had to walk into a boardroom four days later and pretend I knew what I was doing." He paused. "I've been pretending ever since. I got very good at it. Good enough that people forgot it was ever pretending."

Vivienne felt something in her chest crack open, unexpected and unwelcome. That's the truest thing anyone's said to me in two years, she said quietly.

"Your turn," Damian said.

She hesitated. Then "My father hid this debt from me for years. I found out he was drowning the same week I found out he was dead. I've spent every day since then trying to prove I could fix what he broke, because if I couldn't, then everything I built my whole life around being the one who saves things was a lie." She looked down at her hands. "I don't know how to be anything else. I don't know who I am if I'm not the person holding this studio together."

Neither of them said anything for a long moment.

"Eighteen months," Damian said finally, quiet, careful, like he was handing her something breakable. That's all I'm asking for. After that, you walk away debt-free, and I never have to explain to a board of old men why I'm still single at thirty-five. We both get out of something we didn't choose. And if it's a disaster? If we can't stand each other in public?

"Then we fake it very well for eighteen months," he said, "and go our separate ways with our dignity mostly intact."

Vivienne almost laughed. Almost.

"I need to think," she said, standing. "I need to talk to Renata. I need, I need more than one night to decide the next eighteen months of my life."

"Take the time," Damian said. "I told you Friday. I meant it. Whatever my lawyer did, that wasn't me going back on my word."

She believed him. That scared her more than the debt did.

She was almost to the elevator when his voice stopped her.

"Ms. Marsh."

She turned. He was standing in his office doorway, hands in his pockets, watching her with an expression she couldn't read.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I looked into your work before I called your studio. The Whitfield triptych you restored last year, the one everyone said was beyond saving." A pause. "You didn't just fix it. You made people forget it was ever broken. That's rare. I don't offer this arrangement to just anyone. I offered it to you because some part of me believes you could do that with more than paintings."

Before she could answer, before she could even process the way that sentence landed somewhere dangerously close to her heart, his phone rang. He glanced at it, and whatever softness had been in his face a second ago vanished, replaced by something sharp and guarded.

"I need to take this," he said. "Étienne."

He said the name like a curse.

Vivienne stepped into the elevator, the doors sliding shut between them, and in the last second before they closed completely, she heard him answer the call, his voice suddenly cold in a way it hadn't been all morning.

"What do you mean the board already knows about the marriage clause?" he said. "I haven't told anyone. Nobody outside this office even knows I'm considering"

The doors shut.

Vivienne stood frozen in the elevator as it began its long drop toward the ground floor, her heart hammering, one sentence echoing in her head over and over.

Somebody already knew about the contract before she'd even agreed to sign it.

Which meant someone inside Voss Enterprises  someone close enough to know about a private family will was already working against Damian. And whoever it was, they'd just made sure the entire board would be watching her decision before she'd even had the chance to make it.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from an unknown number. Ms. Marsh. You don't know me yet. But you should know exactly what you're signing up for before you put your name on that contract. Meet me. Alone. Tonight.

Vivienne's blood went cold.

Someone outside that office already knew her name. Already knew about the contract. And they wanted to talk to her  without Damian in the room.

She had six days to decide whether to marry a man she barely knew. She now had six hours to decide whether to trust a stranger who already seemed to know more about her situation than she did.