THE BILLIONAIRE'S BARGAIN BRIDE

WHAT PRIYA FOUND

Chapter Eight: What Priya Found

"So I did a thing," Priya announced, dropping into the chair across from Elena's desk with the particular energy of someone who knew she was about to complicate everyone's morning.

"That sentence has never once preceded good news."

"I looked into the ex-fiancée. The one who left him at the altar."

Elena set down her coffee very carefully, like the mug might otherwise end up on the floor. "Priya."

"Don't 'Priya' me, you're about to marry this man for real optics in front of four hundred wedding guests eventually, allegedly-not-really, and I wanted to know what we're dealing with. You're welcome."

"That's — deeply unethical, and also I hate that I want to know what you found."

Priya pulled out her phone, scrolling with the grim satisfaction of a woman who'd done her homework. "Her name's Vanessa Kirkland. Socialite, old money, the kind of engagement that got a two-page spread in three different magazines. Wedding was set for a Saturday in October, two years ago. Four hundred guests, a venue that cost more than our entire year's revenue, and she didn't show."

"At all?"

"She sent a text. To his assistant. Forty minutes before the ceremony. Said she'd met someone else turned out to be a hedge fund guy she'd apparently been seeing for months and that she was sorry but she 'couldn't do it.'" Priya winced, reading further. "There's a photo. Of Damian. Standing at the altar, waiting, before anyone told him. Some guest posted it years ago and it still floats around occasionally. He looks…"

"Don't," Elena said quietly. "I don't need to see it."

But Priya turned the phone anyway, and Elena looked despite herself.

It was Damian, younger, in a tuxedo, standing at the front of an enormous, flower-choked chapel, hands clasped, waiting with the particular stillness of a man who didn't yet know he had a reason to be afraid. There was something in his face in that photo — an openness, a hope — that Elena had never once seen on him in the weeks she'd known him. She understood, looking at it, exactly what six months of contract negotiations and careful distance had cost him to build, brick by brick, after that day.

"Elena." Priya's voice had gone gentler. "You okay?"

"I'm thinking," Elena said slowly, "about the night market. About how he laughed like it surprised him. About how careful he is with everything, all the time, like he's still bracing for the room to find out the wedding's off."

"You like him," Priya said. It wasn't a question.

"I'm not supposed to."

"I don't think anyone ever is." Priya took the phone back, softer now. "For what it's worth — the guy in that photo doesn't look like someone who deserved what happened. He looks like someone who was about to be happy."

Elena thought about the terrace at the Foundation dinner, the way Damian had said I don't know what to do with the fact that a woman I've known for eleven days can make me feel something like that, and how she'd filed it away afterward as something she wasn't allowed to examine too closely, because examining it meant admitting the contract had stopped being the whole truth.

Her phone buzzed on the desk. Damian.

Grandmother wants us at dinner Sunday. Fair warning… she's already planning seating charts for a wedding that isn't real. I told her to stop. She did not stop.

Elena smiled before she could help it, thumbs hovering over the reply.

Tell her I like round tables. Better for conversation.

You're encouraging her.

I'm managing her. There's a difference, allegedly.

That's exactly what you told me about the venue on our first meeting. I'm noticing a pattern.

Elena looked up to find Priya watching her with an expression that was equal parts fond and deeply, deeply worried.

"What?" Elena said.

"Nothing," Priya said. "Just.. you're smiling at your phone like a person who forgot this was supposed to be a job."

Elena looked back down at the screen, at Damian's last message still glowing there, and didn't have a good enough answer for that. She wasn't sure, anymore, that there was one.