Merger Bride

3. Elena

The "orientation" for my new role as Daniel Cross's fiancée took place in a penthouse that felt less like a home and more like a museum for people who enjoyed suffering.

Everything was white marble and charcoal grey. It was cold. It was sterile. It was exactly like Daniel.

"You'll move in here," he said, gesturing to the sprawling space. "We cannot be seen living apart. The board needs to believe this is a whirlwind romance, not a business arrangement."

"A whirlwind romance," I repeated, my voice dripping with sarcasm. "Should I start practicing my 'smitten' face in the mirror, or does that come with the wardrobe?"

Daniel stepped closer, his presence crowding me into the edge of a velvet sofa. He didn't stop until he was in my personal space, his breath warm against my temple.

"The 'smitten' look is easy, Elena," he murmured. "Just pretend you're thinking about how much you want to ruin me. That usually looks like passion."

He reached down, his hand sliding around my waist. He didn't pull me in, but he didn't let go. The grip was possessive, firm, and entirely too familiar.

"What's this?" I asked, my gaze catching on a small black box sitting alone on the marble coffee table, deliberately placed, deliberately staged, the way everything in this apartment seemed to be.

He released my waist and crossed to retrieve it, flipping the lid open with a thumb before I could reach for it myself. Inside sat a ring I recognized immediately, though I hated that some traitorous part of me still remembered it after all these years—a slim platinum band, an emerald-cut stone flanked by two smaller diamonds, the kind of understated, staggering wealth that didn't need to announce itself.

"My grandmother's ring," he said, watching my face for a reaction he didn't get. "It photographs well. The board has seen pictures of it before—my mother wore it for thirty years. It lends the whole thing a certain... provenance."

"You're recycling family heirlooms for a business transaction."

"I'm using what's available to make the lie convincing. That's the entire job description, Elena. I'd think you'd have read the fine print before you signed it."

He took my left hand before I could stop him, his fingers closing around mine with a firmness that left no room for negotiation. The ring slid on with unsettling ease, like it had been sized for me specifically, though I told myself that was impossible, that it was simply a small ring on a small hand and nothing more.

"There," he said, turning my hand slightly to catch the light. "Forty-two million dollars, right there on your finger. Cheap, considering."

"Don't," I said, pulling my hand back, the ring suddenly heavier than its weight should have allowed. "Don't reduce this to a number every time you open your mouth. This is my father's company. This is twenty-two people's livelihoods. It is not a line item on your quarterly report."

Something flickered across his face—not quite guilt, Daniel didn't do guilt, but something adjacent to it, something that looked almost like restraint. "Fine," he said. "No numbers. But you should know exactly what you're wearing, because the board will ask, and you need an answer that doesn't sound rehearsed."

"Everything about tonight sounds rehearsed."

"That's the point."

I moved past him toward the windows, needing distance, needing air that didn't smell like sandalwood and money. Crestview City sprawled beneath us, indifferent as ever, the Voss Plaza site visible even from here if I knew exactly where to look—a half-finished skeleton of steel my father had died believing would be his masterpiece, and which I had spent three years alternately protecting and resenting in equal measure.

"There are rules," I said, without turning around. "If I'm doing this."

"I assumed there would be."

"You don't touch me unless there are cameras. You don't discuss my brother, not with the board, not with the press, not with me. And whatever this is—" I gestured vaguely between us, unable to find a better word for the charged, electric silence that kept filling every room we occupied together, "—it stays exactly what it is. A performance. Nothing leaks past the cameras."

"Understood." He said it too easily, the way he said everything, like agreement cost him nothing because he'd already calculated he could get what he wanted some other way.

"I mean it, Daniel."

"I heard you the first time." He came to stand beside me at the window, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him despite the careful inch of space between us. "For what it's worth, I don't discuss Julian with anyone. Not the board. Not the press. Not myself, if I can help it."

There was something underneath that sentence, some weight he wasn't handing me the rest of, and I felt the old, familiar urge to press on it, to find the c***k and pull until something gave. I'd spent three years learning not to trust easy answers from men who profited from my desperation. I wasn't about to start with this one.

"Why do you care what happens to my company at all?" I asked instead. "You could have let the bank take it. Cheaper. Cleaner. No fake ring, no fake fiancée, no six months of pretending you can stand to be in a room with me."

He was quiet long enough that I turned to look at him, and found him already watching me, his expression unreadable in the low amber light of the penthouse.

"Maybe I don't hate being in a room with you as much as you'd like to believe," he said finally.

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

He reached out again, slower this time, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with the man who'd handed me a forty-two-million-dollar debt figure like a weather report an hour earlier. My breath caught somewhere in my chest, and I hated myself for it, hated the way my body seemed determined to remember things my mind had worked very hard to forget.

"The gala is in three days," he said, his voice dropping, quieter now, almost private. "Sterling himself will be there. Beatrice too, no doubt, since my board hasn't entirely given up on that particular merger of their own design. You'll need to look at me like I'm the only man in the room."

"That's going to require a considerable amount of acting."

"I have faith in you." The corner of his mouth curved, not quite a smile, but close enough that it did something unwelcome to my pulse. "You've been lying to yourself successfully for years. I don't imagine lying to a room full of strangers will be much harder."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means," he said, stepping back at last, putting the distance between us that I should have wanted and found myself, infuriatingly, missing the moment it appeared, "that I know exactly how good you are at pretending you don't feel things, Elena. I learned from the best."

He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. The comment sat in the air between us like a held breath, and I understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, that whatever this arrangement was going to cost me, the ring on my finger was going to be the smallest part of the bill.

"I should go," I said. "If I'm moving in, I have things to arrange first. My office. My staff. My life, Daniel, which does not simply pause because you've decided to rearrange it."

"Take the week," he said. "But be back by Thursday. And Elena—" He waited until I'd turned to face him fully, until there was no possibility of pretending I hadn't heard him. "Wear something that photographs well. The board isn't the only audience I need convinced."

I didn't ask what he meant by that. I told myself I didn't want to know.

I left the penthouse with his grandmother's ring still on my finger, a forty-two-million-dollar weight I hadn't quite decided how to carry, and the uncomfortable, undeniable knowledge that some part of me some old, buried, humiliating part of me was almost looking forward to Thursday.