CONTRACT TO FOREVER

Emily Carter had exactly four hundred and twelve dollars in her checking account and a mother who needed a two-hundred-thousand-dollar heart surgery by the end of the month. She did the math again anyway, as if it might change. It didn't. It never did. The message had come through an agency she'd never heard of, forwarded from a nursing colleague who swore it was legitimate. Private family seeking short-term live-in caregiver/companion. Compensation: $50,000/month. Discretion required. Interview today, 6 PM. She'd almost deleted it as a scam. Almost. But four hundred and twelve dollars had a way of making a person suspend disbelief. The address turned out to be a glass tower in the financial district, the kind of building where the elevator required a key card just to acknowledge you existed. A woman in a charcoal suit met her in the lobby, said nothing about the job, and walked her up thirty-one floors in silence. The office at the top didn't look like an office. It looked like a throne room with better lighting. William Hart stood at the window with his back to her, and even before he turned around, Emily understood something instinctively — the way prey understands, before it fully sees the shape in the grass, that it should be afraid. When he did turn, she almost took a step back. Not because he was cruel-looking. Because he wasn't. He was the kind of handsome that felt like a held breath, and his eyes swept over her once, cataloguing, deciding, in under two seconds. "Miss Bello," he said. "Sit down." She didn't. "I was told this was a caregiving position." "It is." He gestured to the chair across from his desk anyway, and after a moment, she took it, if only because her knees weren't entirely convinced they'd hold her up through this conversation standing. "I have three children. Nine, seven, and four. Their mother died two years ago. Since then I have gone through eleven nannies, four therapists, and one very expensive tutor who quit after my daughter put a spider in her bag. My children need stability. My business needs the appearance of it. You will provide both." "I'm a nurse. Not a nanny." "I'm aware. I read your file." He said it so plainly that she felt, absurdly, exposed — as if he'd read more than a résumé. "Your mother is on a cardiac surgery waitlist at Bellevue General. Dr. Okafor, if I'm not mistaken. Good surgeon. Expensive one." Emily's spine went rigid. "How do you know that?" "I know everything relevant to a decision before I make it. It's why I'm still in business." He finally sat, unhurried, unbothered by the fact that he'd just confirmed he'd had her investigated like a hostile takeover target. "Here is the offer, Miss Bello, and I'd ask you to hear the whole thing before you decide to be offended by it. I need a wife. Not permanently — eighteen months, perhaps two years, long enough to convince certain people that the Hart family is stable, and long enough for my children to have something resembling a mother in the house again. In exchange, your mother's surgery is paid in full, upfront, tomorrow morning, regardless of what you decide tonight. And you receive fifty thousand dollars a month for the duration of the contract." The number didn't even feel real. She let it sit in the air a second before she trusted her own voice. "You want to marry me." "I want to contract you. There's a difference, and I'd encourage you to remember it." Something flickered behind his eyes — not warmth, but the ghost of where warmth used to live. "There will be no expectation of — " he paused, choosing the word like it cost him something, "— intimacy. Separate rooms. This is a business arrangement between two adults who happen to also raise three children under one roof for the length of a contract. You walk away in two years with your mother healthy, your debts gone, and a settlement large enough that you never have to work a double shift at that hospital again unless you want to." Emily thought of her mother's hands shaking around her coffee cup that morning, the way she'd laughed off the tremor and changed the subject. She thought of the surgery date that kept getting pushed back because they couldn't make the deposit. She thought, treacherously, of how tired she was of being the strong one for everyone and having nothing left over for herself. "And the children," she said slowly. "They know? About this being — fake?" Something in his jaw tightened, the first genuinely unguarded thing she'd seen from him. "No. And they won't. As far as anyone is concerned — my children included — this marriage is real. That is not negotiable." "You're asking me to lie to three grieving kids." "I'm asking you to give them eighteen months of not being lied to by a revolving door of strangers who leave the moment it gets hard." His voice didn't rise, but something underneath it did. "My daughter hasn't cried in front of another human being since her mother's funeral. My son hasn't spoken more than ten words to anyone outside this family in a year. You can walk out of here in the next five minutes and go back to your life, Miss Bello, and I will find someone else by morning. Or you can stay, and in two years, my mother's — " he stopped, corrected himself with the faintest, most human c***k in his composure she'd seen yet, "— your mother's heart will still be beating." Emily looked at him for a long moment — this man built like a fortress with a family falling apart quietly behind its walls — and heard herself say the word before she'd fully decided to. "Okay." William didn't smile. But something in the room's temperature shifted, like a held breath finally released. "Good," he said, sliding a contract across the desk that had clearly been drawn up before she'd ever walked in. "The wedding is Saturday. My lawyer will go over the terms with you tonight. Welcome to the family, Mrs. Hart." She hadn't even said yes to that part yet. But looking at the papers in front of her — at the zero after zero after zero — she understood, with the sinking, electric feeling of a woman stepping off a cliff she'd chosen herself, that she already had.