THE BILLIONAIRE'S ACCIDENTAL VOW, Married to My Enemy

House Rules

He took her home that same night, because apparently that was a thing husbands did — even husbands acquired by ambush, in a candlelit room, from a stack of unread paperwork.

The penthouse crowned Vale Tower: three full floors of grey glass and greyer stone, wrapped in a silence so complete it had a texture, a weight, a presence of its own. It was beautiful the way a held breath is beautiful, and warm the way a tomb is warm — which is to say, not at all. There were no photographs anywhere on any surface. No clutter, no color, no half-read book left spine-up, no mug abandoned on a table, no single soft or careless thing to suggest a living human being with a history and a heart actually resided here. It was the home of a man assembled rather than born, and Isla stood in the middle of its vast pale living room in a wedding gown that was never hers to wear and felt, absurdly, homesick for a drafty atelier with a leaking roof.

"East wing is yours." Ronan shrugged out of his jacket as he moved through the space, rolling his shirtsleeves back over forearms she was deeply irritated to catch herself noticing. "Staff arrive at seven and are gone by nine. You'll have the entire floor to yourself after that — complete privacy, which I imagine you'll want. My study is off the east corridor, and it is off-limits. That isn't a preference I'm sharing with you. It's a rule I'm giving you." He glanced back over his shoulder. "And you appear on my arm whenever I require it, and when you do, you're convincing. Can you be convincing?"

"I just convinced an entire cathedral full of strangers that I wanted to marry you," she said, with a sweetness sharp enough to cut. "I think I can survive a dinner party."

The corner of his mouth twitched. He killed it fast — but not fast enough, and not before something small and warm registered in her chest at having pulled it out of him against his will. It felt, ridiculously, like a point scored in a game she hadn't agreed to play.

"Rules," he said, holding up one long hand and counting them off against his fingers. "One. No press without me. Not a quote, not a candid photo, not a smile aimed at a stranger holding up a phone. You are a Vale now, and everything you do in public belongs to a story I control very carefully. Two. You do not leave this building without security. Not for the atelier, not for coffee, not for air." He watched her open her mouth to argue and spoke over the beginning of it. "That rule is not about controlling where you go. It's about the brick that came through your atelier window this afternoon, at four-forty, while you were three floors below me signing your own marriage license without reading it."

Isla went still. "You keep mentioning this brick."

"Because it matters." He crossed to a low console and slid open a drawer, and took out a slim clear evidence sleeve, the kind she'd only ever seen on television, and held it up. Inside was a torn scrap of paper, the handwriting on it thick and pressed hard enough to tear. "My people repaired the window and swept the glass before you'd finished your paperwork. They also found this, tied around the brick with wire."

She crossed the room without deciding to, her bare feet silent on the cold stone. He held the sleeve steady in the low light. The words swam up at her through the plastic, thick and pressed and furious, the pen driven so hard in places that it had punched clean through the paper.

STOP SEWING OR BURN AGAIN.

She read it three times. The handwriting meant nothing to her. The message meant nothing to her. And yet her whole body had gone cold at it, the way a body knows a thing the mind refuses, the way a hand knows a stove is hot before the pain arrives.

The floor of her stomach dropped out. "Burn again." She looked up at him. "Why would it say again?"

"I was hoping," Ronan said, watching her very closely, "that you could tell me."

"I don't—" But something was moving at the back of her mind, some old cold thing turning over in the dark, and she shut her mouth before it could surface, because she wasn't ready, because she'd spent eighteen years not being ready. "I don't know," she finished, and it came out thin.

He let it go. He was, she was beginning to understand, a man who noticed exactly when to let a thing go — and filed away the fact that he'd let it go, for later. He slid the sleeve back into the drawer and closed it.

"Three," he said, and stepped toward her, and the air in the enormous grey room seemed to change density around them. "We are not friends. We are two people with a shared enemy and a shared problem, and I need you to hold on to the second half of that sentence even when the first half gets complicated." His gaze dropped, for one deliberate and unhurried second, to her mouth. "Even though I kissed you tonight. That was for the room. It doesn't repeat, and it doesn't mean anything, and you'd do well to remember both of those things."

"Believe me," Isla said, tilting her chin up to meet him head-on, because retreating from anything had never once been in her nature, "forgetting to hate you is not going to be my problem."

But the words came out lower than she'd meant them to, roughened somewhere in her throat, and she saw him hear it. She watched his gaze snag on her mouth and hold there a half-second past anything he could have called an accident. She watched his throat move as he swallowed whatever he'd been about to say. And for one taut, humming moment the space between their two bodies was very small and very warm and crowded with everything neither of them had any intention of ever admitting out loud.

Then Ronan stepped back — deliberately, the way a careful man draws his hand back out of a fire before it can decide to keep him.

"Goodnight, Mrs. Vale," he said, and the Mrs. Vale came out rough at the edges, dragged low out of somewhere he clearly hadn't meant to let her hear, and he turned and walked away down the long grey corridor like leaving the room cost him something he would very much have preferred it didn't.

Isla stood alone in the enormous silence until the sound of his footsteps had faded entirely into the building's deep and expensive quiet. Then she did what she had always done in a new and frightening place, ever since she was eight years old and newly orphaned in a stranger's spare room — she snooped. Snooping was how you learned the true shape of a danger. Snooping was how a small person survived in a large and unfamiliar house full of adults with their own reasons.

The rooms of the east wing were hotel-perfect and utterly, deliberately impersonal. A bedroom the size of her entire apartment, made up in silver and slate, the bed so precisely turned down it looked like a photograph of a bed. A dressing room already hung, she discovered with a lurch, with clothes in her size — someone had known her measurements before tonight, and that thought sat cold and strange in her stomach. A bathroom of black marble where the towels were folded into perfect white rectangles no one had ever dried a hand on. She moved through it all quickly, opening drawers that held nothing, closets that held only more of the same expensive emptiness, learning less with every room and growing more certain by the minute that the man she'd married had been printed rather than raised, extruded whole and cold from the side of this building — until she reached the library. And there, on a low shelf beneath a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over ten million glittering city lights, she found a long row of leather-bound albums. And inside them, at last, a life.

She sank down onto the cold floor with the first album open across her knees. A boy with grey eyes and a real, unguarded, gap-toothed smile — maybe ten years old — one arm slung hard around the neck of a smaller boy who was so obviously his brother that it made something in Isla's chest ache without permission. A stern old man with a full lion's mane of white hair and a proud hand laid on each boy's shoulder. A grand estate wreathed in summer green, sunlight lying gold across old grey stone, an entire childhood she would never in a hundred years have guessed at, hidden behind the ice of the man down the hall.

She turned the heavy, cream-colored pages one after another, telling herself she was building a weapon, telling herself this was reconnaissance and nothing more, telling herself she felt nothing at all looking at the boy he'd been —

Until one photograph stopped her heart mid-beat.

The white-maned patriarch again, standing on the estate's broad front steps in the flat gold light of some long-ago afternoon. And beside him — the old man's hand resting easy and warm and familiar on the younger man's shoulder — stood someone else. Dark hair. A wide, open, delighted laugh aimed at something just outside the frame of the photograph. At ease. Familiar. Unmistakably, achingly loved.

Isla knew that face.

She had exactly one photograph of it in a battered shoebox under her narrow bed at the atelier — the single image of him she owned in all the world. She had traced its edges with the pad of her fingertip a thousand times over on the worst nights of her childhood, after the fire, after the funeral where there had been a polished coffin but no body inside it to bury, because there had been nothing left of him to find.

Her father.

Elias Verano. Dead for eighteen years. A quiet, gentle, thread-callused man who had never in his life so much as brushed against a world like this one — standing on the front steps of the Vale family estate, in a photograph that could not and should not exist, with the grandfather of the man she had married three hours ago resting a hand on his shoulder like the two of them were kin.

Behind her, from the library doorway, Ronan Vale's voice came soft and lethal into the quiet.

"Where," he said, "did you find that?"