His Forgotten One Night Bride

Chapter Four

Evelyn Ashford arrived at the mansion the way she had arrived everywhere like the building already belonged to her and everyone else was just borrowing it.

Lucien heard her cane against the marble before he heard her voice, and he set down his pen, already bracing himself. His grandmother didn't visit for no reason. She visited when she wanted something, and lately what she wanted was always the same thing.

"You look tired," she said, settling into the chair across from his desk without being asked. "Tired and unmarried. Both of which I have opinions about."

"Good morning to you too."

"Don't be smart with me, Lucien." She folded her hands over the head of her cane, watching him with the same sharp, unblinking look she'd used on him since he was a boy who'd rather read than shake hands with investors. "The board meets in six weeks. You know what happens if you walk in there still single."

He did know. He'd known for months, ever since his father's will had turned out to have more strings attached than anyone expected — a clause meant to force him to "settle down" before the company would fully pass to him, or so his father must have believed a wife would fix a son he never understood. If Lucien wasn't married by the board meeting, control of Ashford Global went to a committee. And Damian, his cousin, already had three votes on that committee in his pocket and was working on a fourth.

"I don't need a wife to run this company," Lucien said. "I've been running it for years."

"You've been running it under my son's rules," Evelyn said, not unkindly, just plainly. "Rules he wrote because he knew exactly how stubborn you'd be about this. He wanted grandchildren before he died, Lucien. He wanted to know you'd let someone in, just once, before you turned into the kind of man who dies alone in a house this size."

The words landed harder than she probably meant them to. Or maybe exactly as hard as she meant them to. His grandmother was many things, but she was rarely careless with her aim.

"I'm not marrying someone I don't know for the sake of a board vote."

"Then find someone you do know. Sophia Bennett has made her interest fairly obvious, in case you hadn't noticed. Beautiful, well-connected, from a good family. It wouldn't be the worst arrangement in the world."

He thought of Sophia's laugh, practiced and a half-second too late every time, like she was performing for whoever might be watching. He thought of every conversation they'd ever had, all of them somehow about him — his company, his money, his name — and none of them about anything real.

Then, without meaning to, he thought of a hallway last week. A flower vase. A hand steady around his while she pressed a bandage to his palm, asking nothing of him at all.

"I'll figure it out," he said.

"You have six weeks," Evelyn said, rising slowly, leaning on her cane. "Don't waste them being proud." She paused at the door, looking back at him with something softer under the sharpness. "I'm not doing this to punish you, Lucien. I watched you become this—" she gestured vaguely at the office, the desk, the whole cold machinery of his life "—and I don't want it to be all you ever become."

She left before he could answer that.

He sat alone for a long time after she'd gone, staring at nothing, turning her words over the way he turned over contract clauses, looking for the flaw in them and not finding one. Six weeks. A wife, or a company, handed over to a cousin who'd put it into the ground out of pure spite.

He thought about Sophia again and felt nothing. He thought about the list of names his assistant had quietly compiled of "suitable" women from good families, all of them interchangeable in his mind, and felt the same nothing.

Then Oliver knocked and stuck his head in with some questions about the afternoon schedule, and through the open door Lucien caught a glimpse of the east wing hallway beyond him — and a woman in a plain uniform, dusting a shelf, completely unaware she was being watched.

He didn't know why the idea landed the way it did, sudden and clear, like something clicking into a lock it had been made for.

She wasn't from a good family. She wasn't connected, or ambitious, or angling for anything from him — she'd made that much obvious every time she avoided his eyes in the hallway like she'd rather be anywhere else. She needed money. He needed a wife who wouldn't complicate his life with real feelings, wouldn't scheme with Damian, wouldn't perform for cameras the way Sophia would. A clean arrangement. Business, plain and simple, with a woman who'd have every reason to keep her side of the deal and none to want more from him than what was written down.

It was, he told himself, the most practical solution in front of him.

He ignored, for now, the small inconvenient fact that his pulse had picked up the second the idea formed — the same way it had in the hallway with her hand around his, the same way it had every time he'd caught himself thinking her name since.

"Oliver," he said. "Get me Ariana Vale's file. Full background, nothing left out."

Oliver blinked. "The new cleaner?"

"That's the one."

If Oliver had questions, he was smart enough not to ask them out loud. He nodded and left, and Lucien sat back in his chair, telling himself this was strategy and nothing more — a contract, a signature, a problem solved before the board meeting.

He had no idea he was about to hand a business proposal to the one woman on earth who already knew, somewhere underneath five years of forgetting, exactly what it felt like to fall asleep in his arms.