The Billionaire Meant for my Stepsister

The Dossier

POV: Kathryn

Lord Reginald handed the folder to Judith. Judith handed it to me.

"It is better we know who we're dealing with," she said in a low voice meant only for the two of us, though nothing in that house ever felt truly private. "It’s better if you read it first then tell me if there's anything I should be worried about before your sister sees it."

I took the folder into the small sitting room off the main hall, a room done up in pale green silk that felt like standing inside an eggshell, and closed the door behind me before I let myself breathe properly. My hands weren't quite steady. I told myself it was the day catching up with me, the cold and Lady Constance's particular brand of cruelty, and not the small, insistent hope that had been living under my ribs since Pete the locksmith said a name I hadn't asked him to say.

I opened the folder.

The first page contained numbers. Net worth, holdings, a chart of Ashford Global's expansion over the last decade that meant nothing to me beyond the sheer, obscene size of the figures involved. I didn't bother to read it closely and turned the page, the way you turn over a card you already suspect you don't want to see.

The second page had a photograph clipped to the corner.

I knew the jaw before I let myself know anything else. I knew the particular angle of it, the same angle I'd watched from across a café table two days ago while rain ticked against the glass and a stranger told me he had a feeling we'd see each other again. I knew the eyes, dark and unhurried, the same eyes that had studied me like I was a puzzle worth the time to solve.

MICHAEL ASHFORD, the page said, in clean black type, like it was nothing, like it wasn't rearranging every cell in my body at once.

Age 34.

CEO, Ashford Global.

Educated Oxford and Wharton.

Estimated net worth £2.8 billion.

I sat down without deciding to. I felt the coldness of the silk chair through my dress.

There was a roaring in my ears that had nothing to do with the house, nothing to do with the Whitmores or the debt or any of the reasons I'd told myself justified this trip. There was only the photograph, and the six minutes I'd spent arguing with him over a chair, and the terrible, understanding that the man I had not been able to stop thinking about for two straight days was the man my stepsister was going to marry.

I read the rest of the page twice without absorbing a single additional fact. My eyes kept sliding back to the photograph like a tongue returning to a sore tooth. I checked and rechecked that I hadn't imagined the resemblance.I hoped with a shame that curdled in my stomach even as I hoped it, that I had.

I hadn't imagined it.

The door opened. I closed the folder too fast, too obviously, and Judith stepped in with a cup of tea she hadn't asked if I wanted, reading my face with the particular attention of a mother who'd spent a lifetime learning to catch things before they became emergencies.

"You've gone pale," she said. "What is it? Is he cruel? Is there something in there we should be afraid of?"

I thought about the six minutes. I thought about the dry, unwilling smile he'd given me, the way he'd kicked the chair out from under the table instead of letting me stand there and lose. I thought about how easy it would be, right now, in this small green room, to tell Judith the truth and let her decide what to do with it.

I thought about Elouise twisting a tissue into a rope at the lawyer's table, asking when do we leave like a girl finally handed a task worth doing.

"No," I said, and the word came out steadier than I felt. "Nothing like that. He looks like exactly what the folder says. Rich. Successful. A little cold in photographs, but that is how it is with most men like him."

It wasn't exactly a lie. It was simply not the truth, and I would spend a long time afterward trying to convince myself there was a meaningful difference between the two.

Judith exhaled, some of the tension leaving her shoulders. "Good. That's good. Elouise should be able to handle cold. She has handled cold her whole life, growing up in my mother's house on the holidays we were forced to visit."

She reached over and squeezed my hand, the same gesture from the lawyer's office, except this time her rings weren't cold at all, just tired. "Thank you for reading it first. I know it isn't your job to shield her from things but you do it anyway."

Yes, I did it anyway. I had done it for so long that I no longer knew where the habit ended and I began.

"I'll always look out for her," I said, and meant it completely, even as the folder sat closed in my lap like something already burning through the paper.

Judith left to find Elouise, to talk through tomorrow's introduction, to prepare her daughter for a meeting Elouise still believed would be her first. I sat alone in the pale green room for a long moment, the folder open again on my knees, and made myself look, one more time, at the photograph of a man I had already met, already argued with, already, God help me, already wanted.

Tomorrow I would stand in a room and watch him meet my stepsister for what everyone but the two of us would believe was the first time.

I did not know, yet, whether he had recognized the name Whitmore when he read it, or whether some version of this same collision was happening on his end of London at this exact moment. A folder with my face in it, a name he now knew belonged to the woman who'd fought him for a chair.

I only knew that whatever came next, I was walking into it no longer innocent.

I had known his face for two days. Tomorrow, everyone else would learn it too, and I would have to stand there and pretend I hadn't already learned it first.