Chapter 18
1378 Words
Geraldine’s Point of View
I woke to unfamiliar ceiling lights and the soft rustle of sheets. For a moment I lay still, the edges of sleep clinging to me, then a frown formed as I realized I was in a room I did not know. My hand went instinctively to my leg and I felt the rough pressure of a bandage. The fabric of the blanket slipped through my fingers.
“This blanket is so soft,” I murmured before I remembered nothing about how I got here.
I pushed myself up. Pain flared—sharp and surprising—along the back of my leg. I glanced down. The bandage was neat and clean. Confusion tightened my chest. How did I end up in such a nice room? Whose bedroom was this?
Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Alert now, I grabbed the pillow at my side as if it could be used like a shield. I prepared to throw it at whoever opened the door. The motion stopped halfway when I saw his face.
Mike stood in the doorway, brows drawn in a crease that made his whole face look severe. He had a tray in his hands. My heart kicked, and I hid the pillow behind me like a guilty child.
“Hello, Master,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
He regarded me with skeptical amusement. “Are you trying to attack me?”
“N-no,” I stammered. “I was just exercising.”
I raised and lowered the pillow in nervous little movements while he watched. The tray clinked when he set it on the table. I peered and my breath stalled. Soup. And beside it, medicine.
“That soup looks like the one I made,” I said, heat rising to my face. “I put that aside earlier.”
He nodded slowly. “Chef told me you had set some aside so I had it brought here.”
I felt a pang of sadness for my ruined effort. “It’s such a waste that the other woman treated it that way. But don’t worry, Master. We can split it. There is a lot. I could never eat it all.”
As I spoke, an urgent question pushed through the fog. “Master, how did I get here? Whose room is this?”
“My bedroom in the office,” he answered simply.
My eyes widened. “But you always said—no one may enter your room except you and your wife. How did I get inside?”
He tilted his head like a man considering an amusing riddle. “Do you know the answer to that?”
My throat closed. “W-What do you mean?”
Mike reached for a picture frame on the bedside table and extended it toward me. Slowly I looked. My heart lurched. A wedding photograph. Us. Him and me in wedding attire, smiling at an angle of the camera that made the whole scene irreversibly real.
“Why are you showing this to me, Master?” I whispered.
He held my gaze without blinking. “Are you denying that I am your husband, Mrs. Muller?”
My mind scrambled. “Huh?”
A smile curved his mouth, small and satisfied. He stepped closer, and before I could brace myself he cupped my jaw and kissed me. It was not gentle. It was an assertion. My eyes widened as our lips met. I tasted myself in him and the odd familiarity swamped me—like someone recognizing a face in a crowd and finding it somehow theirs.
When he broke the kiss I gulped for air, heart pounding. He watched me as if he were reading a book and I was the story he had been rereading.
“You seem to have made a mistake. I’m not your wife,” I blurted, hoping to push him off-balance.
He laughed softly, sharp and certain. “I can memorize a face with a single glance. I remembered you because I did not only see you. I touched you. I tasted you. You slipped away that night without telling me, my naughty wife.”
Panic rose, clumsy and hot. “No. It was just one night. You used me as a substitute bride. Last night happened because we were drunk and nothing more.”
He said my full name then, and my skin seemed to shrink with the impact. “Geraldine Filipponi Muller.”
“How do you know that name?” I asked, stunned.
He walked to a cabinet, opened it with practiced ease, and pulled out a paper. He handed it to me and I snatched it like it would bite. My eyes widened as recognition struck in a sick, small way. My own handwriting—my signature—stared back. The paper was a marriage contract.
My throat closed. I had signed this? No. I could not remember signing anything like that.
“You really did sign it,” he said calmly. “You wrote your name on our marriage contract.”
Pain and fury tangled inside me like a knot. I had been discovered. I swallowed hard and tried to gather my scattered wits. What could I possibly do now?
“Yes, it was our first night together,” he said, watching me as if he already knew every defense I would form. “But I do not know if it was your first kiss.”
“You took my first and my second kiss,” I spat, heat rising in my face. “You were the first to kiss me.”
He looked pleased. “Not only the first and second. I think I lost count when we made love.”
My face burned. “That night was an accident. Nothing more. I was a substitute. We both were drunk. It meant nothing.”
He folded his arms but then asked something that pierced deeper than any accusation. “You needed money that night, didn’t you?”
I blinked and then carefully nodded.
“Why did you not take anything from me then? Did you not accept the check I left on the bed?”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
He stepped toward me slowly until I backed into the headboard, cornered. I pressed my palms to my thighs to hide the tremble.
“Master,” I whispered.
“That was not what you called me that night, wife,” he said, and the word stung because of how easy he made it sound.
I swallowed. “I only wanted to help you with the wedding. Nothing more. I heard your company was bankrupt so I refused the money. I helped without telling you because I thought it was best.”
His face changed for a heartbeat. He had laughed aloud before, and then laughter turned to something quieter.
“You really are funny. I will never be without money. Did you run away because you thought I had none and you left me in that room on our first day as husband and wife? Or was there another plan?”
My chest shuttered. Nothing like that had been planned. My life suddenly felt like a script I was reading for the first time and the lines were not mine to change.
He studied me, then walked around the bed until he stood very close. For a second I thought he might forgive my feigned ignorance. Instead he put a hand to the bandage on my leg and softened. “You must be hurting.”
I could have denied it. I did not. I let my guard down like a curtain slackening.
“You are strange,” he murmured as if to himself. “So mysterious. I want to know you better.”
The words landed like a promise I did not know how to accept. My pulse slowed. My defenses, which had been razor-sharp just a moment ago, dulled in the face of the warmth that suddenly felt possible.
Outside the room the house resumed its ordinary noises, indifferent to the tiny world where a woman who could not remember signing a marriage contract lay in a man’s bed and tried to remember how she had become his wife.
*****
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