SINFUL VOWS

SINFUL VOWS Elena Marlowe had practised the lie in the bathroom mirror eleven times, and it still sounded like one. "Hello, I'm Elena. Julian's fiancée." She tried a softer smile. Her reflection looked like a girl pretending to be someone else, which, she supposed, was exactly the point. "You're doing it again," Aunt Rosa said from the doorway, arms folded over her faded cardigan. "Frowning at yourself like the mirror owes you money." "The mirror doesn't owe me anything. A stranger does. Two thousand dollars." Elena turned around. "For one night, Aunt Rosa. One night of smiling and holding a man's arm." "A man who is paying you to lie to his parents." Rosa's mouth tightened. "Nothing good comes from lying to rich people, Elena. They always find a way to make you pay for it." "They can't take what I don't have." The words came out sharper than she meant. Rosa's eyes moved to the bucket in the corner of the hallway, the one that caught the drip from the ceiling every time it rained, and neither of them said anything for a moment. The rent was three weeks late. The landlord had stopped knocking and started sliding notes under the door. Rosa sighed and crossed the room. She tucked a loose curl behind Elena's ear, the way Elena's mother used to. "Your mother would have hated this." "My mother would have done it," Elena said quietly, "if it meant keeping the lights on." That was the truth, and they both knew it. Her mother had worked herself into the ground and left behind a daughter, a borrowed aunt and a pile of debts. Before her there had been her father, who had also owed money, to the wrong people. Elena had been nine when the men in dark suits came to the door. She remembered their polished shoes and the way her father's hands shook as he stood. She remembered that none of them looked angry. That was the part she could never forgive. They were calm, the way people are when they've done something many times. He never came home. Elena had spent fourteen years making sure she never went near anything that smelled of that world. No flashy cars, no men with quiet voices and expensive watches, nothing connected to power that didn't have to explain itself. So a fake engagement to a spoiled millionaire's son was, by comparison, practically wholesome. A horn sounded outside. "That's him." Elena grabbed the clutch Rosa had borrowed from a neighbour. "I'll be home before midnight." "Cinderella never was," Rosa muttered, but she kissed Elena's forehead anyway. * * * Julian Hart was exactly as handsome as his photograph and a great deal more tired. He sat in the back of the black car with his bow tie hanging loose, and when Elena slid in beside him, he gave her the kind of look a man gives a bridge he's about to cross and might not trust. "You came," he said. "Honestly, I wasn't sure you would." "You paid half upfront. I always show up for money." He laughed, startled, and some of the tension left his shoulders. "Fair. Okay. The rules." He counted them off on his fingers. "We met at a charity auction eight months ago. You're a graduate student in art history. You hate shrimp. My mother will ask about your family, so say they're in Vermont and you don't see them much." "Why Vermont?" "Nobody in my parents' circle has ever been to Vermont." Elena almost smiled. "And if your mother asks about the ring?" Julian winced and pulled a small velvet box from his pocket. The diamond inside caught the passing streetlights and threw tiny sparks across the car's ceiling. "It was my grandmother's. Please don't lose it. And please," he added, softer, "don't let her see you're nervous. If my parents think this is real, they'll stop trying to marry me off to Cecilia Ashford, and I will finally be able to breathe." Elena slid the ring on. It fit perfectly, which felt like a bad omen. "Breathe," she told him. "I've got this." She had no idea whether she did. * * * The Hartwell Hotel ballroom was the most beautiful room Elena had ever stood in, and she hated it immediately. It glittered. Three chandeliers dripped light over a sea of silk and tuxedos, and a quartet in the corner played something soft enough to be forgotten. Waiters drifted past with trays of champagne, and every person in the room seemed to be laughing at exactly the right volume. Julian's hand settled at the small of her back. "Smile," he murmured. "Parents, twelve o'clock." Victoria Hart was a slender woman in emerald silk, with a smile so polished it could have been mounted on a wall. Beside her, Charles Hart looked Elena over the way he might examine a suspicious invoice. "So this is the girl," Victoria said. "Elena Marlowe," Julian said warmly. "My fiancée." The word landed in the air between them, bright and brittle. Elena put out her hand and let her smile bloom the way she'd practised. "It's wonderful to finally meet you both. Julian talks about you constantly." "Does he?" Victoria's eyes flicked to the ring, then back to Elena's face. "How curious. He has told us almost nothing about you." "I'm a private person," Elena said, and squeezed Julian's arm exactly as hard as she'd planned to. For ten minutes the performance held. She answered questions about art history with the confidence of a woman who had once borrowed a textbook from the library. She laughed at Charles Hart's joke about the stock market. She even managed not to flinch when Victoria said, "Vermont, how charming," in a tone that suggested she knew precisely how many lies she'd just been handed. It was only when Julian was pulled away by a pair of cousins that Elena let her gaze drift across the room. That was when she noticed him. He stood near the balcony doors, apart from the crowd, though the crowd seemed arranged around him all the same. He was tall, with dark hair swept back and a black suit that fit like it had been cut for him alone. He wasn't doing anything. He wasn't talking or smiling or sipping a drink. He simply stood there, hands in his pockets, watching the room with the lazy attention of a man who owned the building. Two other men in dark suits stood a few steps behind him, entirely still. Elena knew that stillness. She had known it since she was nine years old. Her stomach turned over, cold. She looked away at once, and the stranger's gaze brushed past her like a hand sliding across a table, there and gone, but she felt it all the way to her spine. Not my problem, she told herself firmly. Smile, collect the money, go home. She reached for a glass of champagne to steady her hands. And across the crowded ballroom, laughing with a girl in a red dress, stood the one person in the world she had hoped never to see again. Ryan. Her ex-boyfriend turned his head, and his smile slowly died as he recognised her. The champagne glass trembled in her hand, and every lie she had so carefully built began to tilt.