THE BILLIONAIRE'S BARGAIN BRIDE

THE REAL DATE

Chapter Seven: The Real Date

"It's for the story," Damian said, over the phone, in a tone that suggested he'd rehearsed the line and still didn't quite believe it. "Photographers have been following the engagement narrative loosely. A public date will make the story feel solid."

"Solid," Elena repeated, tucking the phone against her shoulder while she pinned a swatch board to the wall of her office. "Is that the technical term?"

"It's the term my publicist used, so, yes."

"Fine. Where does a billionaire take his contractually obligated fiancée to make things look solid?"

There was a pause. "Where would you actually want to go? Not for the cameras. If this were real."

The question caught her off guard enough that she set down her pushpins. "That's not really the assignment."

"Humor me."

Elena thought about it — really thought about it, which was its own small unsettling thing, that she wanted to give him a true answer instead of a convenient one. "There's a night market that sets up on the pier on Thursdays. My dad used to take me. Terrible food, better company. I haven't been in years."

"Thursday, then," Damian said, like it was already decided. "I'll have the car pick you up at seven."

"You don't have a car with tinted windows big enough to hide a CEO at a night market, Damian. We're taking my car. It has character."

"Your car has character in the same way a science project has character," Damian said, and Elena could hear, unmistakably, that he was almost smiling.

Thursday came, and Elena's ancient hatchback rattled its way to the pier with Damian folded into the passenger seat looking deeply, comically out of place, a man built for glass towers wedged between a coffee-stained cup holder and a stack of old event binders.

"I want it noted," he said, as she parallel parked with more confidence than the space warranted, "that I could have arranged something considerably more comfortable."

"Noted and rejected," Elena said. "Comfortable isn't the point."

The night market smelled like fried dough and salt air, strings of paper lanterns swaying over stalls selling everything from dumplings to hand-carved jewelry. Nobody recognized him, or if they did, nobody cared enough to interrupt a man in a plain jacket eating noodles off a paper plate like it was the most novel thing he'd done in a year.

"This is genuinely terrible," Damian said, around a mouthful of something fried and unidentifiable, sounding delighted about it.

"I told you." Elena grinned, wiping a smear of sauce off her thumb. "My dad used to say the food here was an act of faith. You eat it because you believe the vendor loves what they're doing more than they care about food safety ratings."

"That's either the worst business philosophy I've ever heard or the best one."

"Both. He ran his venue the same way. Believed people could feel it, if you cared enough about the thing you were making. Turns out he was mostly right, people remembered the weddings, not the budget line items."

Damian was quiet for a moment, watching her over his paper plate, something unguarded moving behind his expression. "You talk about him like he's still teaching you things."

"He is," Elena said, surprised by how easily it came out, here, with fried dough grease on her fingers and no cameras in sight. "Every time I make a decision about the venue, I ask what he'd have done. It's probably not healthy. Priya says I've built an entire management philosophy around a ghost."

"I think it sounds like the opposite of unhealthy," Damian said. "I think it sounds like you loved him well enough that losing him didn't erase what he taught you." He hesitated, then added, more quietly: "I don't have that. With my father. We didn't.. it wasn't like that, between us. I inherited the company because I was the only Cole left willing to run it, not because anyone believed I should."

"Is that why you never wanted it?"

"I never wanted it because I watched it eat my father alive," Damian said. "He worked himself into a heart attack at fifty-eight for a company that replaced him within the month. I promised myself I wouldn't do the same thing, and then I did it anyway, because apparently that's what Coles do — we say we'll be different and then the will reads itself into our lives regardless."

Elena reached over, without entirely deciding to, and set her hand over his on the railing they'd ended up leaning against, lanterns swaying gold light across the water below.

"You get to be different," she said. "It's not too late. It's never too late until you're actually dead, and even then I hear some people manage to leave excellent instructions."

Damian laughed.... really laughed, a sound she hadn't heard from him before, low and startled out of him like he'd forgotten his own capacity for it. He turned his hand under hers, palm to palm, and neither of them moved to let go.

"For the record," he said, "this was not, in fact, for the cameras."

"No," Elena agreed, watching the lanterns instead of him, because looking at him directly right now felt like standing too close to something that might burn. "I don't think it was."

They stayed until the market closed, and if the drive home was quieter than the ride there, it was the kind of quiet that didn't need filling.