His Forgotten One Night Bride

Chapter Five

Oliver found her in the supply closet, folding towels that didn't need folding, just to have something to do with her hands before her shift ended.

"Mr. Ashford wants to see you. His study, now."

Her stomach dropped the way it had the first time. "Did I break something?"

"Not that I know of." Oliver's face gave nothing away, which somehow made it worse. "He said to send you up as soon as you were free."

She untied her apron, smoothed her hair back with damp hands, and told herself, whatever this was, she could handle it. She'd been fired before. She'd survive being fired again.

The walk down the hall felt longer than it had any right to be. She knocked. His voice told her to come in.

He was standing behind his desk this time, not at the window, dressed the same way he always was — like the suit was armor as much as clothing. There was a folder in front of him, closed, his name typed on the tab. She saw it and her stomach dropped again, differently this time.

"Sit down," he said. Not unkind. Just direct.

She sat.

"I'm going to say something, and I need you to hear the whole thing before you react." He laced his fingers together on the desk. "I have a problem. My father's will requires me to be married before a board meeting six weeks from now, or I lose control of this company to people who would run it into the ground for their own benefit. I don't want a real marriage. I don't have time for one, and frankly, I don't believe in the kind people usually mean when they say that word."

Ariana said nothing. She had no idea where this was going, only that it was going somewhere she wasn't prepared for.

"I'm offering you a contract," he said. "Marry me on paper. Live here, play the part when it's needed — dinners, the board, my grandmother. In exchange, I'll clear whatever debt you're carrying, pay you a salary on top of that, and when it's over — a year, maybe two — we end it cleanly, and you walk away with enough money to never worry about rent again."

For a second she just stared at him, waiting for the part where he told her he was joking.

"You want to marry your housekeeper," she said finally.

"I want to marry someone who has no interest in actually marrying me," he said. "That happens to be you."

It should have insulted her. Somehow it didn't, not exactly — there was something almost honest in how bluntly he'd said it, no pretending, no performance. He wasn't trying to charm her into it. He was laying out numbers on a table like any other deal.

"Why me?" she asked. "You could have anyone. Actresses. Socialites. Women who'd probably pay you for the chance."

Something flickered across his face — the same small flicker she'd seen once before, gone before she could name it. "Because you don't want anything from me," he said. "Everyone else in my life wants something. My cousin wants my company. The women my grandmother suggests want my name. You just want to pay your bills and be left alone. That's easier for me to trust than love ever would be."

She thought of her mother's last unpaid bill, still sitting in a drawer at home because she couldn't look at it and couldn't throw it away either. She thought of four more years of rent she couldn't guarantee, of picking up extra shifts until her body gave out, of the particular exhaustion of always being one bad week from losing everything.

And underneath all of it, quieter, she thought of his hand in hers last week, and how it had felt like remembering something instead of learning it for the first time.

"What happens if I say no?" she asked.

"Then you go back to cleaning my house, and I find someone else, and none of this ever happened." He said it plainly, no pressure in it, which somehow made the offer harder to refuse than if he'd pushed. "I'm not going to talk you into this, Ariana. I'm telling you what's on the table."

She looked at him for a long moment — this cold, careful, unreachable man who'd just offered to erase every debt keeping her up at night in exchange for pretending, for a year or two, that she belonged in a house like this. It wasn't romantic. It wasn't supposed to be. It was a business deal, plain and simple, and business deals were something she understood.

"I'll need it in writing," she said. "Everything. The debt, the salary, how it ends."

Something in his face eased, just slightly — not quite relief, but close to it. "You'll have it by tomorrow."

"And I keep my own room."

"Of course."

"And nobody outside this house knows it isn't real."

"Nobody," he agreed. "Not even my grandmother."

She nodded, once, before she could talk herself out of it. "Then yes. I'll marry you, Mr. Ashford."

"Lucien," he said. "If we're doing this, you might as well use my name."

She said it slowly, testing the shape of it the way you test ice before stepping onto it. "Lucien."

Something passed between them in that moment, brief and strange — a stillness neither of them could explain, like a word spoken in a room that had heard it before. She told herself it was just nerves. He told himself it was nothing at all.

Neither of them noticed the folder on his desk had slipped half open, revealing a photograph clipped to her file — a candid shot from some old holiday party, nothing special, except for the earring in it, small and gold, shaped like a leaf. The same earring, if either of them had thought to look closely enough, that a stranger had once found on his hotel pillow five years ago and quietly kept in a drawer he never opened anymore.

Neither of them

Hem looked closely enough. Not yet.