THE BILLIONAIRE'S ACCIDENTAL VOW, Married to My Enemy

"Ninety seconds, Ms. Verano. Chin up. Try to look like a woman in love." Isla Verano did not feel like a woman in love. She felt like a woman who had signed nine documents she hadn't read, because the alternative was standing in a dark and freezing atelier at midnight, watching everything she loved get carried out the door by men with clipboards and dollies and no particular feelings about it either way. The handler didn't wait for a reply. He steered her by the elbow down a corridor of white marble so polished she could see the ghost of herself moving along beneath her feet, and every step made the gown whisper against her skin — a low, silken sound, like a secret being kept badly. Hand-laid lace climbed her shoulder. A swan curve dipped at her throat. Isla knew that curve. She had drawn it, three years ago, on the back of a paper napkin in a café that no longer existed, and then refined it over forty sleepless nights until it was flawless, until it was the centerpiece of the collection that was supposed to make her name known in every fashion house on two continents. The collection the world had ended up calling stolen. The one that had helped bury her instead. Her stolen dream. Laced onto her own body. In a tower owned by the empire that had ruined her. She should have torn the dress off there in the corridor and walked out into the January night barefoot, and let the whole gleaming building watch her go. But the memory of the red-stamped eviction notice was still folded in her coat pocket somewhere three floors below, and the sound of Margot Deveraux's cough — that small, dignified, terrible cough she tried so hard to hide — was still lodged behind Isla's ribs like a splinter of glass. And so she kept walking. One evening, the email had promised, from a sender with no name and no logo. Discreet campaign engagement. Full confidentiality. Compensation on completion. And then a number. A number with enough zeros to pay Margot's medical bills, the atelier's eight months of back rent, and the notice that said VACATE in a red so bright it looked like a wound. "Through those doors," the handler said, stopping her before a set tall enough to admit a horse. "You'll be given your cues inside. Speak when the officiant speaks. Hold your marks for the stills. And whatever you're feeling, Ms. Verano, keep it off your face. The client pays for serenity." The officiant. An odd word for a photo shoot, she thought, and then let the thought go, because she was too tired and too broke and too close to the edge to chase down every strange word a stranger used. The doors opened. Isla's breath left her body all at once. It was not a studio. There were no light rigs, no reflectors, no half-drunk assistants clutching lattes and lightning meters. It was a room out of a fever dream — cathedral-tall, its ceiling lost in shadow, drowned floor to invisible rafters in candlelight. A hundred white roses spilled from a hundred silver urns and perfumed the air until it was almost too much to breathe. And down the center of the enormous room ran an aisle. An actual aisle, carpeted in ivory, leading to a raised altar where a small round man in clerical black stood clutching a worn leather book against his chest. A vow-renewal campaign, Isla told herself, seizing the story with both hands and holding on the way a climber holds a rope. A luxury brand. They want a beautiful bride and a beautiful groom and a beautiful lie for a beautiful advertisement, and they'll shoot it in soft focus and sell perfume with it. That's all. Stand where they say. Hit your marks. Take the obscene amount of money. Save Margot. Leave and never come back. A man waited at the end of the aisle. Black tuxedo, cut so precisely it looked less like clothing than architecture. Shoulders that read, even from across a hundred feet of candlelight, as a kind of threat. His back was to her, his dark head slightly bowed, as though he were bearing something heavy and had been bearing it a long time. Then, as if he'd felt her come in, he turned. And every drop of blood in Isla Verano's body turned to ice. She knew that face. Everyone in this city knew that face — it stared out of the business pages and the gossip columns and, for two solid years, out of her own worst nightmares. Ronan Vale. The Ronan Vale. The Merciless Prince of Vale Tower, the man whose media empire had smeared her name into oblivion with three coordinated headlines, one anonymous source, and a single ruinous night. He looked at her now the way a blade looks at a throat — cold, precise, patient, already certain of the outcome. And then something flared behind those winter-grey eyes, something quick and hot and entirely, impossibly not cold, and it was gone again before she could name it or be sure she'd seen it at all. "You," she breathed. The word barely made it past her lips. "You're the client. This is your campaign." "Walk," he said, low and even. "Or lose everything you came here to save." Her legs moved before her pride could stop them, and she hated them for it, one traitorous step at a time down that ivory aisle. The officiant was already speaking when she reached the altar and took the place beside a man she'd sworn to destroy. Dearly beloved. The old words landed strange and heavy in the vast, breathing dark, and some distant alarm began to ring at the very back of her skull — this was too formal, too still, there was no photographer's assistant shouting hold that, gorgeous, chin down, one more — but the alarm drowned under the roaring of her own fury at simply being made to share this small square of scented air with Ronan Vale. "The vows, if you will," the officiant murmured. Ronan recited his in a flat, ruthless monotone, as though reading a hostile clause in a contract he fully intended to win. I take you. To have. To hold. In sickness. In health. Words with all the warmth of a bank statement. Right up until the very last line — and then his voice dropped, low and certain and terrible, and his grey eyes locked onto hers and refused, absolutely, to release them. "With everything I have," he said, "I take you." Something in Isla's stomach turned slowly over. She told herself, fiercely, that it was disgust. "And now the bride," said the officiant, tilting his round head at her, gentle as a grandfather. She was so busy hating the man beside her that she repeated the words a stranger fed her without weighing a single one of them on any scale. She looked Ronan Vale dead in the eye the entire time, chin high, spine straight, daring the invisible cameras to capture exactly how little any of this meant to her. To have. To hold. From this day forward. Just lines in an advertisement. Just a job. Just the price of Margot's next breath. "Then seal it," the officiant said, closing his book, "with a kiss." Neither of them moved. For one suspended second the candles guttered in a draft from nowhere, and the roses seemed to hold their breath, and Isla thought, wildly, he won't, he wouldn't dare, this is the part where the photographer finally says cut and I can go home — Ronan crossed the small distance between them in a single unhurried stride, cupped her jaw in one warm hand, and kissed her. It was meant for the camera. It did not feel, for even a heartbeat, like it was meant for anyone alive but him. His mouth was patient, deliberate, certain — the kiss of a man who had all the time in the world and intended to spend every second of it learning her by heart. Heat detonated low in her belly, total and humiliating, and for one traitorous instant her body forgot the headlines and the ruin and the two years of rage and simply leaned into the man she despised more than anyone on earth. He drew back first. His thumb dragged once, slow, across the arch of her cheekbone before his hand fell away — a touch that felt like the setting of a claim, not the striking of a pose — and when she made herself look up at him his eyes had gone dark and unreadable and, she thought, faintly stunned, as though the kiss had told him something he hadn't asked to know. "Papers," murmured a voice at her elbow. The grey-suited handler had reappeared from the shadows, a leather folder open across both palms, a slim silver pen held out toward her. "The very last one, Ms. Verano. Standard release, and then you're free to go. The car's already waiting downstairs." She signed it without looking, the way she'd signed the eight before it, because her mind was still snagged entirely on his mouth, on the warmth of his palm against her jaw, on how completely she loathed the way her pulse was still slamming against the base of her throat. The photographer — there was, she registered dimly, an actual photographer, half-dissolved in the shadows at the room's edge — lowered his camera. The candles steadied. The officiant tucked his worn leather book beneath one arm and beamed at the two of them with the deep, uncomplicated satisfaction of a professional who had performed his duty flawlessly. "Congratulations to you both," he said warmly. "You're legally married. I'll file the certificate with the county first thing in the morning." Isla went very, very still. The word arrived in her ears and then took a long, floating moment to reach the part of her brain that understood language. "The what," she whispered. She looked down at the folder still open in the handler's steady hands. At the page she had just signed without reading, the same careless way she'd signed the other eight. It was not a standard release. It was a marriage license. Not a release, not a waiver, not a model's standard consent form. A license. Two signatures waited at the bottom of it, side by side, witnessed and dated and horribly, permanently real. One of them was hers — loping and careless and unmistakably, damningly her own, the same signature she'd scrawled on eight other pages without a second's thought. And above it, in ink that had barely finished drying, slashing and black and absolute as a verdict handed down: Ronan Augustus Vale. Across the ruined little scene of white roses and guttering candles, the man she had just married watched her understand it, and did not look away.