All Chapters of The Contract Bride of the Billionaire Heir: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

ARIAThe moment my mother left the room, I knelt at the hearth and pulled the scorched corner out of the fire with the tongs.It was still warm. I blew on it, folded it in half, and slid it into my sock before I could think.Guarantor: Miss A. Dawson."Aria?"I jumped to my feet. My mother stood in the doorway with a small flat package in her hands, her chestnut hair a little looser than before. Her smile was gentle and polite. It was the smile she wore for Charles's guests."Mom.""I told you to go upstairs, Aria.""I was only warming my hands, Mom.""It is June, Aria.""My hands were cold, Mom.""Of course." She closed the door behind her. Her eyes slid to the fireplace, to the ash, to the tongs on the wrong hook."You moved the tongs," she said."I was looking for the poker.""There is no poker in this room.""Then I was simply mistaken." I kept my voice steady. "What did you want to give me?""Sit with me a moment, darling. I brought you something.""A gift?""It is your graduatio

ARIAThe burnt corner crackled against my ankle, loud as a gunshot in the dark."The fireplace," I whispered, low and rough, so he would not know my voice. "I stood too close to it.""Which fireplace?""The drawing room. The maids were burning papers.""Burning papers," his voice was slow and thick with fever. "On graduation night.""Old papers.""What kind of papers burn on a night like this?""Dull ones, mostly.""Dull ones." He almost laughed. "That is the first honest thing anyone has said all evening. Vivian hates fires. She says they ruin her hair.""People change.""Do they?" He laughed weakly. "That is the third thing you have said that she would never say."My heart hammered. I stood very still by the bed and counted breaths."What is the first?" I asked."That you came in without being asked." His hand found the edge of the sheet. "She always waits to be invited.""And the second?""You did not turn on the lamp.""It is dark.""I know." His breath shook. "I like it better."

ARIAMy suitcase was already standing outside my bedroom door when I reached the top of the back stairs, with the shoebox of sketches balanced on the lid and the photograph of my mother at nineteen lying face up on top of it.Somebody had packed for me, and had folded everything better than I ever did.I stood there for a moment with my hand on the wall, because a person can feel two things at once, and what I felt was grateful and sick in about equal parts. Then I walked down the corridor to the dressing room over the herb beds, and the door was open, and the lamp was still burning in the gray light.My mother sat at her dressing table in last night's silk, with her hair half down and both hands flat on the glass top, as though the table might float away if she let go."You were at the window," I said."I couldn't sleep, darling.""Doyle says you watched a man open a car door for me.""I watched you refuse it." She didn't turn around, and I saw her mouth in the mirror, small and stif

ARIA"You look like you've been dragged through a hedge backward," Tilly said, and then she saw my face and pulled me inside by both wrists. "Don't tell me yet, kettle first."Her flat in Hackney was the top floor of a narrow house with a staircase that leaned to the left, and it smelled of toast and old paint and somebody's patchouli. Three bicycles hung in the hall like sleeping bats. A cello case stood in the corner of the living room, and a long boy in a dressing gown was lying on the sofa under a newspaper."That's Dev," Tilly said. "Dev, this is Aria, she's staying, say hello.""Hello," said the newspaper."He plays at night, we've learned to live with it.""I heard that.""You were meant to." She steered me past him into the kitchen and sat me on a stool, and put a mug of tea in my hands before I could say that I didn't want one. "Right, go."I told her, and I didn't tell her everything. I told her about the blue letter and the man with the smile, about my mother and the money,

ARIA"Fennel Street Studio," Tilly read from her phone on Thursday morning, holding it over my cereal like a flag. "Junior drafter wanted, bring portfolio, ask for Owen Mercer, no experience necessary if you can draw a door that looks like a door.""That's a very low bar.""It's the first low bar I've seen in London, go over it.""What if they ask for references?""Then give them Professor Calder, she adores you, she'll tell them you can hold a pencil and a grudge." She pushed my bag across the table. "Wear the gray dress, it makes you look like a person with a plan.""I have three dresses.""The gray one has a plan."Fennel Street was a short, crooked road behind a market, with a bakery on the ground floor of number nine and a green door beside it, with a brass plate that said Studio, and a staircase behind it that smelled of warm bread and pencil shavings. I climbed with my portfolio against my chest, and at the top a young woman looked up from a drawing board and said, without any