The Billionaire’s Lavender Wife

Chapter Two — The Fall

By the time I reached the hospital I was drenched.

London had decided, with its typical spectacular timing, that today was an excellent day to rain. Not the polite kind of drizzle the city usually offered, the committed kind, the kind that soaked through your jacket in three minutes and made your shoes squelch with every step.

I had no money for the tube.

I had forty-three pounds in my account, Kevin's treatment was in eleven days and I had just been fired on camera, in front of what was apparently now several million viewers, so yes, I walked. Forty minutes through the rain with my phone screen lighting up in my pocket every thirty seconds and my cheek still holding the faint heat of a stranger's hand.

I kept checking the news and the news kept reaching me from different strangers on spam calls. I couldn't stop checking the news, it was impossible not to.

The videos were already everywhere. Multiple angles of the café, someone had been filming before the door even burst open, which told me something I didn't want to think about too hard right now. Thousands of comments. My name is trending in four countries. A photograph of me flinching when the egg hit the counter, already turned into a meme with a caption I couldn't bring myself to read fully.

And Arthur Blackwood’s face was on every article. Cold and precise and impossibly composed in every photograph, like a man who had never had an undignified moment in his life and was not planning to start. CEO of Blackwood Industries, twenty-seven years old. One of the most powerful men in the country and apparently my fiancé.

I laughed out loud in the middle of the pavement. A passing woman gave me a look. I didn't blame her.

“Rose Carter is marrying Arthur Blackwood” was the kind of sentence that didn't parse correctly no matter how many times I read it. Like someone had written a story about two different people from two different planets and accidentally put them in the same chapter.

I was still trying to make it parse when I walked straight into someone at the hospital entrance.

The collision was total. One moment I was looking at my phone, the next the world tilted sideways and I was going down, bag flying, phone skidding, palms hitting wet pavement with a sting that shot straight up both arms.

I stayed there for a moment.

On my hands,knees on the wet pavement outside a hospital in the rain, fired, trending, penniless, and now also on the ground.

I took a breath trying to piece my thoughts together.

Then a voice said: “Are you alright?”

Low and unhurried. The kind of voice that didn't need volume because it had never needed to compete with anything.

I looked up instinctively.

The man standing over me was… I couldn’t come up with a word. Tall didn't cover it. Tall was what you said about someone who was slightly above average. This was something else entirely. I had to tilt my head back to find his face and when I found it I understood, with the delayed impact of someone processing too many things at once, exactly whose face it was.

Sharp jaw,dark eyes that were currently focused on me with an attention so complete it felt like being X-rayed. A face I had seen on every screen in London for the past hour.

My mouth opened, then closed.

Arthur Blackwood looked down at me,soaked, on my hands and knees, wearing a coffee-stained café uniform and his expression didn't change. It wasn’t amusement or recognition. It wasn’t anything I could name. Just that same complete, unhurried attention.

“Can you stand?” he said.

I closed my mouth. I opened it again. “You're…”

“Can you stand,” he said again. Not a question this time. He extended one hand toward me,large,steady. The hand of someone who had decided how this moment was going to go and was simply waiting for me to catch up.

I stared at it,then I took it.

He pulled me upright with an ease that I told myself very firmly I was not going to think about, and I stepped back the moment I had my footing, needing the distance, needing to be able to look at his face from somewhere that wasn't directly underneath his chin.

“I'm fine,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. “Thank you. I wasn't watching where I was going.”

He looked at me for a moment. Something flickered across his face, too quick to name.

“Arthur Blackwood,” he said. “I'm here visiting someone in the cardiology ward.”

He said his own name like a fact. No performance,no acknowledgment that his name was currently trending in four countries attached to mine.

I stared at him.

“I know who you are,” I said.

Something shifted in his expression. “I imagine you do.”

Before I could say anything, before I could say the thousand things that were lined up behind my teeth, the reporters appeared.

They materialized from behind two parked cars and a van I hadn't noticed, cameras already running, voices already overlapping,”Arthur! Is she the one?”, “Rose Carter! How do you feel?”, “Mr. Blackwood, can you confirm…”

Arthur turned his head toward them.

He didn't speak nor did he gesture. He simply looked at them, one long, level, completely unhurried look and something in the quality of that look made the voices drop by approximately half and the forward movement stall.

A man appeared at Arthur's shoulder. Mid-thirties, sharp eyes, the composed energy of someone who had been here before and had a system for it. He positioned himself at a precise angle between us and the cameras and looked at the reporters with the flat patience of a man who could stand there all day and would.

The cameras lowered. The voices dropped further.

I didn't waste a second.I turned and walked through the hospital entrance and didn't look back.

Kevin was asleep when I got to the ward.

I sat in the chair beside his bed, the chair I had sat in more times than I could count, in more hospitals than I wanted to remember and I breathed in and out.The monitor beeped its steady rhythm. Kevin's chest rose and fell.

He was fifteen years old and he had Aplastic Anemia and every month I got him to this hospital for his transfusion and every month I found a way to pay for it and every month I told myself we were okay. We were going to be okay.

The doctor found me twenty minutes later.

“Miss Carter.”He sat down. Kind face, careful voice. The voice people used when they had something difficult to say and had said it enough times to have developed a system for the saying. “I need to talk to you about this month's payment.”

I already knew. I had known since I opened my account balance three days ago and sat very still for a very long time.

“Without the payment,” he said, “we won't be able to continue Kevin's treatment schedule. I understand this puts you in a very difficult position..”

“How long do I have?” I asked.

He hesitated. “Four days.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

He left. I sat in the chair and looked at Kevin's sleeping face and didn't let myself think too hard about the number in my bank account or the egg drying on my uniform or the cameras outside.

I was still sitting there when the shadow fell across the curtain.

Arthur Blackwood stepped around the edge of it like he had every right to be there, which, technically, he didn't, but there was something about the way he moved through spaces that made the concept of permission seem slightly beside the point.

He looked at Kevin. Then at me. He pulled the doctor's chair and sat down, forearms on his knees, like a man who had decided he was staying and had no particular interest in discussing it.

“The doctor told me,” he said.

It wasn't information , just facts .

I looked at him. “How long have you been in this hospital?”

“Long enough.”He reached into his jacket and produced a card,black,matte. He held it between two fingers but didn't offer it yet. “I'll cover your brother's treatment. All of it. This month and going forward. Your debts, all of them, cleared. A monthly allowance. A settlement at the end of one year.”

The ward was quiet. Kevin's monitor beeped.

My heart was hammering so loudly I was surprised he couldn't hear it.

“In exchange,” Arthur continued, his voice as level as if he were discussing a business quarter, “you become my wife. Legally,one year and public appearances, private distance, absolute discretion about the nature of the arrangement. After one year, a clean separation and enough money that you will never have to work three jobs again.”

I stared at him.

“You're serious,” I said.

“I never joke about contracts.”

I looked at Kevin. His chest rising and falling, then at the steady monitor.

“What's the catch?” I said.

Arthur's jaw shifted slightly, not a smile, not quite. 'The catch is one year of your life.'’

I looked at my brother, then at the forty-three pounds in my account. I had only four days until his next treatment and the last payment was due. Still, I need to pay off my debt.

“I'll think about it,” I said.

He placed the card on the edge of Kevin's bedside table. He stood, picked up his coat, and walked out of the ward without another word.

I sat in the chair and stared at the card and didn't touch it.

Three hours later, I was still thinking of my next step when Kevin's monitor changed pitch.

It happened fast, the sudden urgency of nurses appearing from nowhere, the curtain swept aside, someone telling me to please wait in the corridor and my legs carrying me there automatically while my brain went white.

I stood in the corridor with my back against the wall.Looking at the card in my hand,I dialed the number without consciously deciding to.

Two rings, then his voice, “Miss Carter.”

Steady, like nothing in the world could rattle it.

“I've decided,” I said. “I'll do it.”

There was a brief silence.

“I'll have my assistant send you the details,” he said. “Get some rest.”

The call ended.

I lowered the phone and looked at the closed curtain and thought, "What have I just done?”

But the monitor behind the curtain had steadied and I already knew the answer.

What I didn't know, couldn't have known, standing in that corridor, was that someone else had been watching the hospital entrance that evening.

She had followed the reporters from the café. Had watched Arthur arrive,seen me fall and had watched him help me up.

She had photographed all of it on her phone and sent every picture to a folder she'd been building for weeks.

Rose Carter,Kevin Carter,Aplastic Anemia,monthly treatments,nine creditors. A bank balance that barely covered bus fare.

She knew everything too well.She had chosen well.

She leaned against the wall of the building across the street, watching the hospital entrance, and allowed herself a small, satisfied smile.

Phase one was complete.

She pushed off the wall and walked away into the dark.She didn't need to see what happened next.

She already knew.