Married to My Father's Killer

Chapter 2

They made me wait forty minutes.

I sat in the lobby of Sinclair Group with my spine straight and my cheap coat folded over my knees, watching people in thousand-dollar suits glide across marble that probably cost more than my mother's hospital bill. Every one of them belonged here. I was the only thing in the room that didn't shine.

I told myself the waiting was a test. A way of reminding me where I stood before I'd even met him.

It was working. That was the worst part.

By the time the assistant finally led me up to the top floor, I'd rehearsed a dozen ways to walk out with my dignity intact. Then the doors opened, and every one of them died in my throat.

He was standing at the window with his back to me, tall and still, the city sprawled at his feet like something he owned. He didn't turn when I came in. He let the silence stretch until it pressed against my skin.

"Sit, Miss Hart."

Hart.

My mother's maiden name. The one I'd hidden behind for three years, the one Julian had used on the contract so the world would never connect me to the Vale scandal. Standing in this man's office, hearing it in his cold, even voice, I understood something that made my pulse spike.

Adrian Sinclair had no idea who I really was.

He didn't know he was about to marry the daughter of the man his family had buried. To him, I was nobody — a desperate woman with a price.

I sat.

He turned then, and I made the mistake of meeting his eyes. Grey. Sharp as cut glass and twice as cold. He looked at me the way a man looks at a contract he hasn't decided whether to sign — assessing, unhurried, faintly bored.

I lifted my chin and looked right back.

Something flickered across his face. Surprise, maybe. People probably didn't hold his stare.

"You read the terms," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I read enough."

"And yet you came." He crossed to the desk and sat, the leather sighing beneath him. "Most women would have signed by now. You're either smarter than the others, or more stubborn. I haven't decided which."

"Maybe I just don't like being summoned like a delivery."

The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. The ghost of one.

"Let me be clear about what this is," he said, sliding the contract across the desk. "I need a wife. The reasons are mine and they don't concern you. You need money — a great deal of it, very quickly. I've seen your mother's medical file." He let that land, watching for the flinch. "Don't look so surprised. I don't sign anything I haven't researched."

My stomach turned. He'd been in my life, picking through the wreckage, and I hadn't even known.

"Then you know I have no reason to trust you," I said.

"You don't need to trust me. You need to sign." He laced his fingers together. "Two years. You play my wife in public, you don't embarrass the family, and at the end you walk away with enough to pay every debt you'll ever have. Your mother gets the best care in the country starting tonight. Tonight, Miss Hart. Not in three days."

The word tonight hit me like a hand around the throat.

He knew. Of course he knew. He knew exactly how little time I had, and he was using it like a blade.

I should have hated him for it. I did hate him. He was a Sinclair, the heir to the empire that had let my father rot in a cell, and every instinct I had screamed at me to throw the contract back in his perfect, indifferent face.

But underneath the hatred, something colder and clearer was already speaking.

This is the door. He's holding it open and he doesn't even know it.

Two years inside the Sinclair house. Two years at the heart of the family that had destroyed mine, close enough to see every secret they'd buried, close enough to find the proof that would clear my father's name and burn them to the ground.

He thought he was buying a wife.

He was letting his enemy through the front gate.

"You're quiet," Adrian observed. "I expected more fight."

"I'm thinking."

"Don't think too long. The offer expires when I leave this room." He stood, buttoning his jacket, already done with me. "My driver will take you back to the hospital either way. Whether your mother keeps her bed is up to what you decide before I reach that door."

He started walking.

"Wait." The word came out sharper than I meant it to.

He stopped. Turned. And for one breath we just stood there, the enemy and the woman who'd come to ruin him, neither of us knowing how true that was.

"I'll sign," I said.

He didn't gloat. He didn't even look satisfied. He simply walked back, set a pen on top of the contract, and watched me with those glass-cold eyes as I picked it up.

My hand was steady. I made sure of it.

I found the line at the bottom, beside his name, and pressed the pen to the paper — and then he said the thing that made the ink stop dead.

"One more term," he said quietly. "Julian Crowe didn't mention it, because I told him not to."

Ice slid down my spine. "What term?"

Adrian leaned down, both hands flat on the desk, until his face was level with mine and I could see there was nothing soft in it at all.

"This marriage isn't going to be on paper, Miss Hart." His voice dropped low, intimate, final. "If you want my name and my money, you live as my wife. My house. My bed. Everyone — my family, the press, every enemy I have — has to believe it's real."

The pen trembled against the page.

"Now," he murmured, "do you still want to sign?"