Forced To Marry My Dead Fiance's Brother

009 An Old Face At The Worst Possible Time

Sebastian

The headline was worse in print than my assistant had made it sound over the phone, which I hadn't thought was possible until I was standing in my own office staring at it on three separate screens.

Grieving Widow or Convenient Timing? Insiders Question Sebastian Vettel's New Romance.

Beneath it, a photograph from the funeral, grainy, clearly taken from a distance with a long lens, of me leaning down to say something to Christabel near the coat check. I didn't even remember the moment. Probably something logistical, about cars, about timing, and somehow it had been turned into evidence of an affair that never happened with a woman who'd buried my brother eleven days ago.

"Do we know who leaked it," I asked, not looking up from the screen.

"Not yet. Legal's looking into it." My assistant hovered near the door, the way she did when she had more bad news and was trying to decide how to pace it out. "There's also this."

She set a second printout on my desk. A different photograph, this one older, from years back, me and a woman with blonde hair and a practiced smile, some gala I barely remembered attending.

"Evelyn Monroe is downstairs," she said. "She's asking to see you. Says it's about the article."

"Since when does Evelyn concern herself with my press coverage."

"Since it's currently the only story anyone in this city is talking about, sir."

I told her to send Evelyn up, mostly because refusing would generate its own headline, and I'd had enough headlines for one week to last me a decade.

Evelyn walked into my office like she still had a standing reservation there, which, to be fair, for a period of time several years ago, she had. She looked exactly the way I remembered, blonde, polished, dressed like she'd anticipated being photographed on her way in, which knowing Evelyn, she probably had.

"Sebastian." She said my name slurry like it still meant something between us, which it hadn't in years. "I came the moment I saw the headlines. This must be devastating for you."

"It's manageable."

"Is it." She sat down across from my desk without being asked, crossing her legs, settling in like she intended to stay a while. "A grieving family, a new fiancée nobody's ever heard of, a scandal already circling before the wedding's even happened. That's not manageable, Sebastian, that's a mess, and I know how much you hate a mess."

"What do you want, Evelyn."

"I want to help." She reached across the desk and set her hand over mine, brief, deliberate, and I pulled back before it could land as anything other than what it was, a calculated move I recognized because I'd watched her make dozens of them over the years we'd known each other. "I still care about you. About what happens to this family. I know things haven't been easy since Elena."

The name landed exactly the way she meant it to.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm not trying to upset you. I'm saying I understand what it costs you to hold everything together, and I'm saying I'm here, the way I always have been, whenever you need someone who actually knows this world instead of some outsider you're marrying out of obligation."

"Christabel is not an outsider marrying me out of obligation. She's—" I stopped, because I didn't actually have the end of that sentence ready, and Evelyn's eyes sharpened, catching the hesitation the way a hawk catches movement in tall grass.

"She's what, Sebastian?"

I didn't answer. I couldn't, not with a truth I hadn't examined closely enough myself yet, and definitely not with Evelyn sitting across from me collecting every unguarded second like currency.

"I only want what's best for you and for Jane," she said, standing, smoothing her dress, the whole visit apparently concluded to her satisfaction. "And I don't think a rushed, forced marriage to a stranger, in the middle of a press scandal, is what's best for either of you. I think you know that too, somewhere underneath all that composure you wear like armor."

"I think you should go, Evelyn."

"I will." She paused at the door, glancing back with an expression that managed to look both sympathetic and predatory at once. "But I'm not going far. And when this arrangement falls apart, and it will, Sebastian, arrangements built on money and grief always do, I'll still be here. The way I always have been."

She left, and I sat alone in my office for a long time afterward, staring at the two printouts on my desk, one accusing me of a romance I hadn't started, one reminding me of a romance I'd actually had and let go of years ago for reasons that felt harder to remember every year that passed.

My phone buzzed. Christabel, a text, the first since our fight in the kitchen that morning.

There are reporters outside the building. Two of them followed me when I went to pick up Jane's medication. I don't know what to do and I don't know who to call and you're apparently the only number I have that anyone in this family will listen to, so. Call me back. Please.