Two Years to Forever

CHAPTER TWO

John clocked her before his mind caught up to why the room had gone quiet around him.

Isabel Conner. She hadn't changed. Eight years, and she still stood like she was bracing for something, chin up, shoulders set, the posture of someone who'd learned early that the room owed her nothing and had decided to stop expecting otherwise. He remembered liking that about her more than he'd ever said out loud, and something in him now recognized it instantly across a crowded room in a green dress that almost took his breath away. She was still beautiful as ever. Even after so long, she hadn't lost her youthful and sexy look. Control yourself!!!

He excused himself from a conversation about supply chain regulations he'd stopped listening to somewhere around the word tariff.

His uncle was here tonight, working the room the way he always did, warm smile deployed at people whose money he wanted and whose spouses' names he'd clearly forgotten. Six months since the will reading. Six months of lawyers explaining, patiently and then less patiently, that the estate stayed frozen until John married and stayed married two full years, or Peter inherited everything their father had spent forty years building from nothing. That cannot happen. Peter was a fraud and had been on his case like a dog on its bone. His father caused this!!!

His father's handwriting on that clause still visited him some nights, unwelcome and precise. You've never had to want anything you couldn't buy or charm your way into. Let's see what you do when you have to actually choose someone and mean it. His father had always known exactly where to aim. He and his father had a rocky relationship. He was his only son but did not show him so much love. He was closer to his mother. He and his father were alike in their arrogance and cockiness.

Apart from that, nothing else.

John had been trying to choose someone for six months, dutifully, the way you try on suits that don't fit right no matter how good the tailor is. The list kept resolving into women who wanted the name Reed pinned to them more than they wanted him attached to it, women who smiled at his jokes half a second too late, calculating something behind their eyes he'd learned to spot years ago. He knew that he had to just be married for two years, but these women could mess things up for him. They were looking too desperate for his family's money. He had tried thinking of ex-girlfriends, but they were all the same except one. He hadn't even thought about her until now.

He remembered that Isabel had never once asked him for anything, not in three years together, not even at the end, when asking might have changed how everything went afterward. Every other woman who'd come near him since had wanted something specific and nameable, and he'd gotten so used to identifying it within minutes of meeting someone that he'd almost forgotten what it felt like to stand near a woman and not immediately catalog her intentions.

An idea began forming behind his ribs, the kind he knew better than to trust before thinking it through. He thought it through anyway, and the longer he turned it over, the less insane it sounded, which should have worried him more than it did.

Two years. A contract. Someone who had never once wanted anything from him except the truth.

Someone whose no he still, eight years on, could not stand. He had to try. He typed out a message on his phone to someone.

His uncle appeared at his elbow. "Enjoying yourself? You've been standing very still for a man at a party."

"Just thinking."

"Dangerous habit, on a deadline." Peter's smile widened. "Six months left, isn't it? Tick tock."

"I'm aware of my own deadline, Uncle."

"Of course you are." Peter's eyes drifted toward Isabel, then back, something calculating underneath the friendliness. "Someone in mind, then?" I hope you are not trying to play any games."

John didn't answer. He crossed the room instead, before he'd fully decided to.