The CEO's Reluctant Bride

CHAPTER 2 — THE BAR

I stood outside the suite door for a good thirty seconds doing absolutely nothing.

Then I straightened my dress, checked that my face was doing the right thing, and walked back into the dining room.

The noise hit me first. Glasses, voices, my mother's laugh cutting through everything else like it always did. The room was fuller now, people finding their seats, waitstaff moving between tables with the kind of quiet efficiency that came from doing this a thousand times. Nobody had noticed I was gone. Why would they. At a certain point these events swallowed everyone whole and individual people stopped mattering.

I spotted Bisi near the window, standing with a glass of red wine and the expression of someone mentally calculating the earliest acceptable time to leave. She had been wearing that expression at family events since we were teenagers and nothing had changed.

I crossed the room toward her.

"Hey." She turned. Looked at my face. Looked harder. "What happened?"

"Nothing. I need a favor."

Bisi had known me since we were seven years old sharing a bedroom at our grandmother's house during school holidays. She took one more look at my face and did not ask a single follow up question. "What do you need."

"In about four minutes I'm going to tell Mum I have a migraine. I need you to back me up and make sure she doesn't follow me out."

A pause. "Zara —"

"Bisi."

A shorter pause. "Okay."

"Thank you."

I gave it three minutes. Stood near the edge of the room, accepted a canapé I did not eat, smiled at Tobias's father when he caught my eye across the room. He smiled back. Warm. Completely unsuspecting. Something twisted briefly in my chest and I made myself let it go because I could not afford it right now.

Tobias had not come back into the room yet.

Good.

I found my mother near the head table going over something with the event coordinator, reading glasses on, the focused expression that meant the centerpiece situation had not been fully resolved to her satisfaction. I had been watching that expression my entire life. I knew exactly how to work around it.

"Mum."

She looked up. "There you are, I was wondering where —"

"I have a migraine." I kept my voice low and my face apologetic and very slightly pained, which was not entirely a lie because my head had started throbbing somewhere around the moment I opened that suite door. "It came on fast. I've had it building since this afternoon."

My mother's expression shifted immediately. The event coordinator took a small diplomatic step back.

"Zara, the dinner starts in fifteen minutes —"

"I know. I'm so sorry." I touched her arm. "I just need to go home and sleep it off. I'll be fine by tomorrow, I promise. Bisi can take my seat, nobody will notice during the dinner portion."

My mother looked at me the way she always did when she was deciding whether something was real or convenient. I held my face very still and thought about the suite and found that the pained expression came quite naturally.

"You do look pale," she said finally.

I was wearing full makeup but I would take it.

"I'll be fine," I said. "Please don't make a fuss. I don't want it to become a thing."

That was the magic sentence. My mother hated things becoming things at her events more than she hated almost anything else. She pressed her lips together, squeezed my hand, and said "go straight home and drink water" in the specific tone she used when she was accepting something she did not fully believe but had decided to let go.

I kissed her cheek.

I walked toward the side exit Bisi had texted me about thirty seconds after I asked for the favor — kitchen corridor left of the bar, heavy door at the end, comes out on the side street — delivered with the calm efficiency of a woman who had been identifying escape routes at family events for years. I loved her enormously.

The corridor was concrete floors and strip lighting and a catering trolley parked against the wall. My heels were loud in a way they had not been on the dining room carpet. I pushed through the heavy door at the end and stepped out onto the side street.

The night air hit me.

I stood in it for a moment. Just stood there in my ivory dress in a service alley with the sounds of the city around me and the distant muffled noise of the restaurant above and I thought, very clearly:

Tobias was going to tell me after the wedding.

I started walking.

I found a bar two streets over. Murphy's. Nothing fancy, nothing that required a reservation or a last name that opened doors, just a wooden sign above a door I could push open myself and a room full of people who had no idea who I was or what I was wearing or why.

I climbed onto a barstool and caught the bartender's eye.

"Whiskey," I said. "Please. And don't be polite about the pour."

He looked at my dress. Looked at my face. Poured generously and moved on without a single question.

Honestly one of the best interactions I'd had all evening.

I was most of the way through it when I made the mistake of thinking about Tobias's face. The color leaving it. His mouth opening. I was going to tell you. After the wedding. I stared at the bottom of my glass. He had looked at me, looked at the dress, looked at the forty people waiting upstairs, and thought yes, we'll sort this out later. After. When it was legally binding.

I signaled for another.

"Rough night?"

I turned.

The man on the stool next to me had not been there a moment ago. I looked at him the way you look at someone when you're deciding in real time whether you have the energy, and the answer was absolutely not, and then my eyes finished doing what they were doing and my brain quietly changed its mind without consulting me.

He was — I was going to be honest with myself because it had been a night — very good looking. Unfairly so. Dark hair, jaw that had no business being that sharp, and the kind of eyes that were doing something in the low bar light that I clocked immediately and looked away from just as fast. Suit jacket off, sleeves rolled up, one arm resting on the bar like he had been here long enough to get comfortable. He was not looking at me the way men sometimes looked at women sitting alone at bars, that particular assessing look that made you want to relocate. He was just looking. Relaxed. Like he had nowhere else to be and had decided the view was decent.

"Define rough," I said.

The corner of his mouth moved. Not a full smile. The beginning of one that knew where it was going. "You're in a formal gown. Alone. On a Tuesday. With a champagne flute that definitely didn't come from this bar."

I looked down at the champagne flute I had apparently carried two streets and not noticed. "It was already in my hand."

"Where'd you come from?"

"Somewhere I'm not going back to."

He nodded like that was a perfectly sufficient answer, picked up his own glass, and looked back at the bar.

Didn't push.

I looked at him sideways. "You're not going to ask?"

"Do you want me to?"

I thought about it. Tobias. The suite. The man whose shirt had been half untucked. My mother accepting a migraine story she did not fully believe. Bisi texting me the escape route without asking why.

"Not even a little bit," I said.

He nodded again. Took a sip of whatever he was drinking.

"Good policy," he said.

I almost smiled. Almost. I picked up my whiskey instead and we sat there for a moment, two strangers at a bar on a Tuesday, and the noise of the room settled around us and I felt, very slightly, like I could breathe.

"I'm Zara," I said. I don't know why I said it.

He looked at me. That almost smile again, closer this time.

"Callum."