THE DEBT BRIDE

Chapter 3: PALM JUMEIRAH MARA

The penthouse did not feel like a place where a person lived. It felt like somewhere a person won.

I stood in the entrance hall with my two suitcases and looked at the kind of space that architects design as an argument, all negative space and clean lines and glass that ran floor to ceiling on three sides so that the Gulf simply became part of the room. The water was everywhere. Dark and wide and lit from beneath the surface by the lights of the Palm's outer crescent, and beyond it the Dubai skyline doing what the Dubai skyline always did, performing itself relentlessly against a sky that had gone the color of a bruise at the edges.

It was eleven at night. The flight had been fine. Kai had sat across the aisle and worked for four and a half hours without speaking to me, which had been simultaneously a relief and quietly irritating in a way I could not fully justify.

"Your room is the second door on the left," he said, appearing from somewhere deeper in the apartment with his jacket gone and his shirt sleeves folded back. He looked less assembled than he had in London, which should have made him seem more accessible. It did not. "Victor arranged the basics. If anything is missing, let him know in the morning."

"Thank you."

He looked at me briefly. "You don't have to thank me for the room. It's part of the arrangement."

I held onto the handle of my suitcase a little tighter. "I'm aware of what it is."

He nodded once and went back the way he had come, and I stood in the entrance hall of his penthouse on the edge of the Arabian Gulf and thought, very clearly: six months is an extremely long time.

****

The room was beautiful and impersonal in equal measure, which I supposed was accurate. A wide bed, good linen, a bathroom with a view of the water that would have been romantic under any other set of circumstances. I unpacked my work things first because that was the ordering that made sense to me: my drawing tools and my site notebooks and my laptop, arranging them on the desk by the window before I unpacked anything else. I needed to see that I was still myself in this room. That I had brought myself with me.

I could not sleep.

At one in the morning, I gave up trying and went to find water, moving through the apartment quietly in the dark, following the ambient light from the windows. The kitchen was at the far end, past the living area, and the living area was the kind of room that was designed to make you feel the scale of everything Kai Deveraux had built, bookshelves along one full wall, low furniture, and a long, narrow console table along the window that held nothing except a small lamp and a framed photograph.

I registered the photograph without meaning to look at it closely. Just a frame, I thought, and then I was past it, and then some visual detail snagged, and I turned back.

Two men. Both young, mid-twenties at the oldest, standing somewhere with bright sun and a coastline behind them. One of them was unmistakably Kai, younger and slightly less contained, caught mid-laugh with his eyes half closed against the light. The other man had his arm around Kai's shoulders and was looking at the camera with the kind of grin that made you feel the warmth of it even through glass and years.

They looked like brothers.

I did not hear Kai come in.

"You're up late."

I turned around. He was standing at the edge of the room in a t-shirt and the same trousers he had travelled in, and he was looking at the photograph in my hand, because I had, without fully deciding to, picked it up. I set it back down on the console table.

"I came for water," I said. "I wasn't going through your things."

"I know." But he did not move, and something in the quality of the room had changed, the way a room changes when a subject arrives that neither person in it has agreed to discuss.

I should have gone to the kitchen. I knew it. I looked at the photograph, and then I looked at him, and I made the choice that I consistently made when a door appeared in front of me, which was to open it.

"Who is he?"

The silence that followed was not like the silences in the Mayfair office. Those had been measured, tactical. This one had weight in it. Real weight.

"My brother," Kai said.

"Does he live here? In Dubai?"

Something moved through his expression that was there and gone so quickly I almost convinced myself I had imagined it.

"No," he said.

The way he said it, with that precise flatness, told me everything, and I understood immediately that I had walked through the wrong door. Not because the question was inappropriate. Because the answer lived somewhere in him that had not healed, and I had just pressed my hand directly against it in the dark at one in the morning.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to—"

"Go to bed, Mara."

Not unkind. Not angry. Said in the same voice he used for everything, that controlled, stripped-down delivery that gave nothing away except that there was, beneath it, something being very deliberately withheld. But he was closer than he had been a moment ago. I was not sure when he had crossed the room. The lamp on the console threw a low, warm light, and we were standing in it, and I was acutely, almost painfully aware of how close, of the specific distance between his chest and my shoulder, which was small enough that I could feel the warmth of him, which was information my body had gathered without asking my permission.

I did not move.

He looked down at me. In the penthouse at one in the morning with the Gulf behind us and the city blazing through the glass, and his brother's photograph on the table between us, he looked at me with an expression I had not yet learned to read. Something that was not the measured appraisal from the office. Something less managed than that.

"You should sleep," he said. His voice had dropped without him seeming to intend it.

"I know."

Neither of us moved for three full seconds.

Then I stepped back, and the space between us returned to something that could be called reasonable, and I took a breath that was more audible than I would have liked.

"Goodnight," I said.

He did not say it back. He stood by the console table with his brother's photograph and watched me cross the room toward the corridor, and I felt the weight of his eyes on my back the entire way, and I did not look over my shoulder even though every nerve in my body was voting strongly for exactly that.

I closed my bedroom door.

Leaned against it in the dark.

My heart was doing something it had no business doing, beating with a kind of loud, inconvenient insistence that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the three seconds we had stood in that lamp-lit room and both, I was certain, chosen not to close the remaining distance.

I was in a contractual arrangement with this man.

I was here to perform a function for six months and then leave and never have to think about the lamp-lit version of him again.

I pressed the back of my head against the door and looked at the dark ceiling and thought about the photograph: his brother's grin, Kai's half-closed eyes, the coastline behind them, the ordinary, irreplaceable fact of two people standing together in the sun.

I thought about his voice when he said no.

I thought about the way he had looked at me when I did not move.

I got into bed and lay in the dark with the sound of the Gulf against the Palm, faint through the glass, and I told myself with great firmness that this was a transaction, that what had happened in that room was proximity and dim lighting and nothing else, and that I needed to stop treating every door I found as something that required opening.

I almost believed it.

Almost.

****