THE BILLIONAIRE’S CHRISTMAS LIE

Chapter Two

Zarah’s POV

The car was already waiting when I came downstairs at ten to nine.

It was long and black, with snow melting on its hood, and the driver held the back door open as if this happened to girls like me every day. Across the street, my neighbor stared from her window. I stared at the car too.

Then I got in. I hadn’t slept. I had spent the night watching my ceiling while questions circled in my head.

How did he know where I lived? Had I broken something at the gala? Insulted someone important? I replayed every second I had spent in that ballroom. Maybe the foundation had complained to Mrs. Marlowe. Maybe I was about to be fired in front of a billionaire.

Blackwood Tower rose in glass in the middle of Midtown. A woman in a gray suit met me in the lobby without a word, swiped a card, and we rode up forty-eight floors. There was still flour on my cuff. I brushed at it, but it stayed.

His office took up the whole top floor. Windows ran from floor to ceiling, and the city lay white and endless beneath them. There were no photographs, nothing personal on the shelves. It looked like it belonged to someone who didn’t want to be known.

Lucien Blackwood stood at the window with his back to me.

“Miss Cole. Sit.”

It wasn’t a request. I sat anyway, because my knees preferred it.

He turned. Without the mask, his face looked harder than I remembered, all sharp lines and gray eyes that gave nothing away. He took the chair across from me and slid a folder over the glass table.

“I don’t waste time, so I’ll be direct.”

“Am I in trouble? About last night?”

“No.”

“Then why am I here?”

“I need a fiancée.”

I waited for him to laugh. He didn’t.

“For seven days, starting tomorrow,” he said. “My company’s sales have dropped since Damien Peters entered the market. People like him. People don’t like me.” He said it plainly.

“The public sees a man with no heart. A Christmas engagement would change that. Interviews, charity events, photographs. A story they can believe.”

“And you picked me,” I said slowly. “The girl with the cake.”

“Yes.”

“You could have any woman in New York.”

“I could have any woman who wants my name.” His eyes didn’t leave mine. “You didn’t ask me for anything last night. You didn’t flinch. I need someone who can stand in front of cameras without falling apart.”

It was a smooth answer, as if rehearsed. His hands rested on the folder and never moved. I kept my own face steady.

I opened the folder. Seven days as his fiancée. Public appearances. Christmas events. Media interviews. Payment on completion: five hundred thousand dollars.

I read the number three times. It was the rent for January, and February. It was the scan I kept postponing, and so much more.

“That’s not a real number,” I whispered.

“It’s in writing.”

“For seven days of smiling?”

“For seven days of being believed.”

Part of me wanted to say yes right then. I was four hundred dollars short with Friday coming, and here was a number that could end the mopping and the math for good. But my pride dug in. I pictured cameras. Strangers dissecting my face. The poor girl who sold herself to a billionaire for Christmas.

“I’d be lying to everyone,” I said. “Pretending to love a man I don’t know.”

“You’d be acting.”

“And when it ends, people will laugh at me.”

“That should be the least of your worries.” He leaned back. “You have until tonight to think about it.”

He didn’t push. He didn’t even look worried. He sat there, unhurried, as if he already knew how this would end.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, and stood.

* * *

Aria Swat, my best friend since high school, almost dropped her coffee.

“Lucien Blackwood? The Lucien Blackwood?” We were in the corner booth of the diner where she always met me, and she gripped the table while I finished. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Aria.”

“Zarah, listen to me. He ruins people. Men who crossed him lost their companies in a week. He’s cold and he’s dangerous, and nobody gets close to him and walks away the same.”

“You’ve followed him for years,” I said gently.

Her cheeks went pink. “Fine. I’ve had a crush on him since college. Everyone does. That’s different from handing him your life.”

“He’s offering five hundred thousand dollars.”

Aria went very still. For a second her face was one I couldn’t read. Then she smiled quickly and put her hand over mine.

“I’ll help you. I have three thousand saved. It’s yours.”

Three thousand dollars. It was kind of her. It was also the first time in two years she had offered me anything, and it was nowhere near what he had put on that table.

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. “But three thousand covers Friday. It doesn’t cover January. Or February. Or a doctor.”

“Money isn’t everything.”

“It is when you don’t have any.”

She looked away. I looked down at my chapped hands wrapped around a cold cup. I didn’t want to feel like I was selling myself, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that number.

* * *

Blackwood Tower glowed against the dark when I returned at nine that night. Lucien was waiting in the same spot where I had left him, as if he hadn’t moved all day.

I didn’t sit down. I picked up the pen.

“Seven days,” I said. “Nothing more.”

“Nothing more,” he agreed.

I signed my name in neat blue ink and slid the page back across the glass.

He looked down at my signature, and his face eased. He looked like a man who had just heard a lock click open.

“Welcome to Christmas, Miss Cole,” he said softly.

I had told myself it was only business. A contract, a number, seven days. I walked out into the falling snow believing I had just made the best deal of my life.

I didn’t look back. If I had, I would have seen him still standing at that window, watching me go, as though I had walked exactly where he wanted me to.