3

Clara The room they'd put me in to wait was too large for one person and too quiet for someone whose entire life had just been rearranged without her permission. Somewhere on the other side of the estate, caterers were finishing a wedding that had been assembled in three days instead of the usual three years, and I sat in a chair by the window in a dress I hadn't chosen, waiting to meet the stranger I was about to marry. I had built an image of Sebastian Ashford in my head from the little I knew. Magazine profiles calling him charming and elusive. Business articles describing him as ruthless in negotiations. My mother's approving murmur when she'd shown me his photograph, as if his jawline alone should have been compensation enough for what I was giving up. I expected arrogance. I expected a man who considered a wife an acquisition, another asset to be filed alongside his properties and stock portfolios. The door opened, and the man who walked in didn't match any of it. He was tall, dark-haired, dressed in a suit that probably cost more than everything Ethan owned, but there was nothing performative in the way he carried it. He looked tired. Not the practiced, photogenic tired of someone who wanted sympathy, but the real kind, the kind I recognized from my own reflection. "Miss Bennett." His voice was quiet, careful. "May I sit?" "It's your house." "It's your wedding too." He sat anyway, keeping a respectful distance, his hands folded loosely in his lap. "I imagine this is not how you pictured your life going." "No," I said. "I imagine it's not how you pictured yours either." Something flickered across his face, there and gone, and for a moment neither of us said anything. Outside, I could hear the faint clink of glasses being arranged, the murmur of staff preparing for a ceremony that would bind two strangers together before the sun went down. "I want to be honest with you," he said finally. "Before anything else happens today. You deserve that much, considering the circumstances under which this was arranged." "All right." He met my eyes, and there was no performance left in him at all, just a kind of quiet bravery I hadn't expected from a man the tabloids painted as untouchable. "I'm gay." The word settled into the room and I found, strangely, that it didn't shock me the way I might have expected. If anything, something in me exhaled. "My family doesn't know," he continued. "They can't know. Not yet. My grandfather built this company from nothing, and the board, the shareholders, half of this city, still operates like it's fifty years in the past. If it became public, it wouldn't just be personal. It would cost thousands of people their jobs. It would undo everything my family has built." "So you need a wife." "I need the appearance of one." He said it plainly, without apology, but also without cruelty. "Someone who can stand beside me at the events I can't avoid, who can carry the Ashford name without it being a lie people ask questions about. In exchange, I intend to give you a life of comfort, security, and complete respect. I will never touch you without your consent, Miss Bennett. I will never expect from you what a real marriage might expect. This is a partnership. Nothing more, unless you ever wanted something more, which I understand may never be the case given what's brought you here." "There's someone else," I said. "You should know that too, if we're being honest with each other." He didn't look surprised. "I assumed there might be. Your father mentioned there had been... complications, before this was arranged. He didn't elaborate." "His name is Ethan." Saying it out loud made my throat tighten. "We've been together five years. He's in the hospital right now, recovering from a surgery my family agreed to pay for, on the condition that I marry you instead of him. I signed the contract two days ago, and he doesn't even know it yet, because he hasn't woken up from the surgery." Sebastian was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had softened even further. "That's a much crueler bargain than the one you're making with me." "I don't regret it. I'd do it again. But I won't pretend it doesn't feel like I've torn something out of my own chest to do it." "I'm not asking you to pretend anything with me," he said. "That's the one thing I can promise you, whatever else this marriage turns out to be. You will never have to perform for me the way you'll have to perform for everyone else." I studied him then, this man I was about to bind my name to, searching for the arrogance the magazines had promised me and finding instead someone who looked as trapped by his own family's expectations as I felt by mine. There was a strange kind of comfort in that. Not romance. Not the aching, electric comfort I felt every time Ethan so much as looked at me. But something steadier. Something honest. "There's someone you love," I said. It wasn't a question. "There is." For the first time, something like real pain crossed his face, quickly hidden. "I can't be with him. Not publicly. Maybe not ever, depending on how long my family holds the reins of this company. But he understands why I'm doing this. He's the only person outside my family who knows the truth." "Then we're both marrying the wrong person," I said quietly. "Then we're both marrying the wrong person," he agreed, and something in the way he said it, gentle, rueful, without a trace of self-pity, made me feel, for the first time since I'd signed that contract, that I might survive this after all. "I don't expect you to love me," he continued. "I don't even expect you to like being married to me, not at first. But I would like it very much if we could be honest with each other. If we could help each other survive whatever comes next." I thought of Ethan lying in that hospital bed, believing, when he finally woke, that I had chosen wealth over him. I thought of the ring he'd made with his own hands, still hidden in the drawer of my old bedroom because I couldn't bring myself to wear it today and I couldn't bring myself to take it off either. "I can do honest," I said. "I don't think I have anything left for more than that right now." "Honest is enough." Sebastian rose and offered his hand, not as a husband claiming a bride, but as someone offering an alliance between two people who understood exactly what the other had sacrificed to be standing in this room. "Shall we go be strangers pretending to be in love, Mrs. Ashford?" I took his hand. "Let's."