All Chapters of THE RELUCTANT MRS. ROWE: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Sloane The contract was eleven pages. I had read it four times before I walked into the building and I was reading it a fifth time now sitting across from the most controlled man I had ever encountered in a professional setting and trying to find the clause that explained why he had chosen me specifically out of every attorney in New York. It was not in the contract. Which meant the reason was somewhere in the room. Beckett Rowe had not moved since I sat down. Had not looked at his phone. Had not glanced at the door or the window or anything that was not me. He just sat at the other end of the boardroom table with his hands flat on the surface and watched me read with the patience of someone who had all afternoon and had decided I was worth the time. That was the first thing that unsettled me. Men like Beckett Rowe did not give anyone their full attention without a reason. And reasons in rooms like this one were never simple. I set the contract down. Looked at him directly. "

Sloane I called Dara from the street. She answered on the first ring which meant she had been sitting with her phone in her hand waiting since I had texted her that I was going into the building. "Well," she said. "I signed," I said. Silence. Long silence. "Sloane." "I know." "You signed a contract to pretend to be Beckett Rowe's wife." "A performance arrangement," I said. "The distinction matters apparently." "The distinction does not matter at all," she said. "Sloane what are you doing." I stood on Fifth Avenue and watched the city move around me and thought about eleven pages of legal precision and a man who had agreed to every condition I presented without hesitation and a message on my phone from an unknown number that I had not told her about yet. "I am protecting my mother's house," I said. "There had to be another way." "I looked for three weeks," I said. "There was not." She was quiet for a moment. "Tell me everything," she said. So I told her. The boardroom

Sloane I could not sleep. I lay in the bedroom that was now technically mine under the terms of an arrangement I had signed forty eight hours ago and stared at the ceiling and thought about everything I knew and everything I did not know and the specific gap between those two things. What I knew. A man had chosen me from a list for reasons he had not disclosed. He had agreed to every condition I presented without negotiation which meant either the conditions were genuinely reasonable or he had known what I was going to ask before I asked it. Probably both. Someone else knew I had signed the contract. Had sent me a message within four minutes of my leaving the building. You have no idea what you just walked into. Which meant they had been watching. Which meant I had been watched before I walked into that building. The flag on my scholarship file that had been sitting unresolved for three weeks. An administrative error supposedly. But the timing was wrong. Administrative errors did

SloaneI didn't sleep.Not even close.I lay in the bedroom that had started feeling less like a guest room and more like mine over the past two weeks and I stared at the ceiling and thought about everything Beckett told me at breakfast and tried to find the angle where it made sense in a way I could live with.I couldn't find it.Phillip Strand had been in my firm for four years. Four years of sitting three offices down from me. Four years of partner meetings and case reviews and corridor conversations and him looking at me across conference tables with that particular expression I had always read as mild condescension.It wasn't condescension.It was management.He had been managing me. Watching me. Making sure I stayed exactly where he needed me to stay so that when the moment came he could use me the way he had always planned to use me.I got up at five.Not because I had somewhere to be. Just because lying down felt wrong. Like my body understood that this was not a situation you

SloaneI noticed things about him.I had been noticing things about him since the first night and I had been filing them away in the part of my brain that I used for information I was not ready to do anything with yet. The part where I put things that complicated the clean version of a situation I needed to stay clean.The file was getting full.He drank his coffee black and too hot. Always. The kind of hot that should be uncomfortable but he never seemed to notice. He worked until at least midnight every night but he was always up before me in the morning which meant he was sleeping maybe five hours and doing it consistently enough that it was clearly just how he operated.He read physical books. Not many people did that anymore. He had three going at any one time, all of them left open face down in different rooms of the penthouse the way you do when you are reading in fragments between other things. I had looked at the spines without meaning to. History mostly. One biography. Nothi