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All Chapters of HOW I BECAME THE BILLIONIARE’S SURROGATE.: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

84 Chapters

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Aria didn't wear a white dress on her wedding day. The family heirloom dress that Morelli's grandmother had passed down, the kind that was kept in a cedar chest and required three people to button was offered to her by Elena, but she admired it and then calmly declined it in a firm manner. She went with a dress she had originally conceived in a fashion school application sketch in a margin, and then a seamstress in the Garment District who works at fair prices and asks no questions turned it into the real thing. Silky champagne. A combination of a structured and fluid one. A neckline that is very simple and sophisticated, without the slightest attempt to be something else. On her wedding day in the morning when she looked in the mirror she saw the woman reflected, and that sufficed for her. The wedding took place at the Morelli mansion. There were one hundred guests, family and friends, the two old-money worlds' social architecture were set up in the garden amongst the three generat

CHAPTER TWELVE

The villa was nestled into the hillside above the ocean and was set among bougainvillea with the fragrance of the sea. The villa had a private pool that looked out directly over the water. Aria was surprised to find the bedroom contained, as she had seen the enormous bed, she and Adrian had stood on either side of it and pondered over this piece of information. "I will take the sofa, " he said. "After all it's your honeymoon. You get the bed." "You are the one having the baby. You take the bed." She glanced at the bed. It was indeed very large. "Besides you and I are grown-ups, " she went on. "We can shareit." He a little as if he too wanted to have a sexual relationship by way of problem-solving, and if that is how their minds work, then this would not be a problem at all. "In that case, " he declared. "I am on my side; You on yours." "We agreed."He was a different person and asleep after just twenty minutes, which she found strangely impressive. However, she needed more time. Besid

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

He signed her up on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, she learned about it when the cream-colored envelope with the crest of Harlow Institute, one of the top three fashion design schools in New York and by the way, the one she had marked in a magazine at seventeen, then folded and carefully kept in the last drawer without mentioning it to anyone, arrived at the penthouse. Adrian had silently put the envelope on the kitchen island, already dressed and leaving for work. She opened the envelope and read the letter twice. "You enrolled me, " she said. He stood in the doorway. "You said you wanted to go." "I said I had been thinking about it." "Yes, " he said. "And then I enrolled you." He looked at his watch. "Orientation is Friday. Marianna will have the car ready at eight." He left. Aria sat with the acceptance letter in her hands for quite a while, and something moved in her chest which she had no name for. It was not really gratitude - or perhaps it was, albeit masked by something quite diffe

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The first time she saw him, she convinced herself she must have been paranoid. It was a Thursday afternoon and they were outside the Harlow Institute ,a man across the street in a dark coat, standing completely still amongst the crowd of people who were moving on the pavement. She only looked at him once and then away and when she looked back he had disappeared, and she thought to herself: you are pregnant, reading a murder journal and living in a billionaire's apartment as a fake wife. Obviously, you are imagining things. The second time was outside the spa she had started going to and she usually went there on Friday mornings, it was a small, quiet place in the West Village which Professor Delacroix had recommended where nobody knew who her husband was and the massage therapist had the good grace not to engage in conversation. The same dark coat. The same almost-motionless posture. She did not look at him long enough to recognize his face. But the third time she was certain. It was

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

His name was Roman, he looked like her husband except for the absence of stillness that her husband possessed. When Aria came down the stairs the next morning, there he was, leaning comfortably against the doorway of the main sitting room in the penthouse. Arms crossed, he was wearing a smile on his face the way a well tailored coat fits one who knows exactly how they look in it. Perhaps he was four years younger than Adrian, had the same dark hair and grey eyes, but while control had carved Adrian's face, Roman's face was more fluid, charm was just one of his tools, and warmth was given. without a promise. She knew the type. She had met him in different guises before. "You must be the wife, " he said. "And you must be the brother who was dead, " she responded with a friendly smile. He looked surprised by her response but soon laughed a natural laugh that showed his genuine self, and for a moment, she saw what he could have been if he hadn't been changed into the person he was now. "H

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

They didn't discuss the kiss. Aria thought this was probably what would happen. Adrian Morelli was the type of man who could stare at a dinner table for three weeks without carrying out a single unnecessary conversation - certainly, he was not going to make the loss of control in a dark terrace incident his topic. Aria, on the other hand, not wanting to reveal her emotional inventory to anyone, also did not bring it up. Instead, they did a very special kind of avoiding each other - the kind of avoidance that exists only between two people who are so determined not to look at each other directly that they try everything else to keep from doing so. Hence, she went to the Institute earlier. He remained in his study later. They walked through the penthouse as if they were two magnets that are held at the same pole - always almost the same distance apart, making small movements without showing that they are actually making adjustments, keeping the distance with the careful, mutual wearines

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

She arrived home on Thursday. When she reentered the penthouse, it seemed a little different, not exactly changed, but altered in the way spaces change when you've been somewhere awful and you come back. The dimensions were the same. The lighting was the same. However, she didn't glide through it smoothly, as one usually does, but rather cautiously, like a person who is navigating a room in the dark: not frightened of the room, only aware of the fact that such a room can have edges and that these edges must be carefully located. Adrian went to the hospital daily. He stayed with her, as people do with a grief that they do not have words for. He was simply there, not playing a part, not acting. He never attempted to talk her out of it or around it. He came with food that she did not eat and sat in the chair near the window and sometimes, when she had fallen asleep, she had woken up to see him still there. She did not thank him. She was unable to identify the words. She was not herself a

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Her mother was very precise. At first, reading the diary was like solving a cipher: the subtle abbreviation system, those dates that looked random until one found their meaning, the names without context that suddenly, after quite a few pages were mentioned again, very clearly. Her mother realized that someone was spying on her. So she wrote in such a manner: to any person that loves her the writing is quite clear, while for others, it is perplexing. It took Aria three months to unravel the whole story. She chose a Wednesday evening in January and the place was the drafting table in the studio room. The journal lay open in front of her and so did her private investigator's latest report. The moment came when everything fitted nicely: the timeline of the dates and the names and the dialogues recorded a single, understandable image and she was frozen for quite a while. She had made a mistake about her mother's murderer. It was her stepmother, in fact, whom she had q

CHAPTER NINETEEN

And this was called inheritance. Her own name had gone on the program documentation three weeks earlier, three weeks till she graduated and whenever she looked at it on the printed page it felt like the word was settling more completely into its flesh. It wasn't the work of words to wield, but the true passport of what she had built.Every bit of the ten projects originated in something given to her: patience from her mother, her mother's documentation, the money remaining in a safe in Greenpoint, the biting specificity of the attention her mother had dedicated to her last years, in such a way that Aria, who learned everything from it, learned everything without learning it, what it looks like to carry out a hard task in right." The work was the inheritance.Not just the collection. All of it. That nine months in this apartment, the program, the mornings at the island, the knowledge that had been developing since October of what she was able to do when she had the space to do it. She

CHAPTER TWENTY

We had a lie-in. This was not like her. She was a morning person naturally she had always been one. But that morning after graduation she got up at exactly eight thirty, and pretty much languished in bed in the particular frame of mind of a body that has just accomplished something big and is hesitating before embarking on the next. The apartment was silent except for some far off noise of Marianna coming in, the hall door, the focused movement of a woman restoring order to her own proper sphere. And further off, the door to the study. He was in his desk chair. Naturally. Wading in bed she thought about the papers of divorce.She did not bring them up last night. She had decided at the island, eating chicken across from him while he posed his questions, that last night was not the night. Last night was the buffet and the dinner and the exacting, deliberate glow of two people who had arrived at

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