The Billionaire’s Emergency Bride

The Wrong Door TALIA Unknown: 24 hours left. Bring the money or die. A wave of iced chills rolled down my spine and I gulped down the last champagne left on my tray. I can’t die. And I cannot lose my brother. But when a man named Dex sat across from me in a booth that smelled like cigarettes 48 hours ago, and told me in a very calm tone that my brother's debt was now my debt. He said my brother had been stupid enough to put our mother's apartment up as collateral. He'd smiled when he said it. Like it was good news. Like it wasn’t a ruin. I looked around this ballroom, looking for my plan – Marcus Webb. Marcus Webb is a philanthropist, semi-drunk on his third glass of champagne by eight-thirty, and he has a reputation for being sentimental about hard-luck stories. I just need five minutes and enough composure to ask him for a loan without crying. I've been rehearsing the speech in bathroom mirrors all evening. But I couldn’t find him amdist the crowd of expensive perfumes and rich laughter. The band were playing a slow song that nobody gave a s**t about. I need to find Marcus, or my life is over. And just when I decided to ho look for my saving plan, one of the senior staff pulls me aside, presses an expensive Macallan into my arms, and tells me it's a priority delivery to the penthouse suite, forty-second floor. VIP only. "Which VIP?" I ask. He's already walking away. "You'll know when you see him." — The scotch is worth more than my rent. I know this because I Googled it just now in the elevator — 1962 Macallan, forty-two thousand dollars a bottle — and now my palms are so damp I'm terrified I'm going to drop it, and then I'll owe the gala and the loan sharks, and that thought alone makes my hands shake worse. I adjust my grip. Breathe. Unknown: 23:49 remaining. The texts don't say who they're from. They don't have to. My breaths were shaky, my nerve cells were trembling. I need to deliver this bottle fast and return to the gala, because I can’t afford to miss Marcus Webb. The elevator dinged opened and revealed a hallway that feels nothing like the rest of the hotel. Quieter. The carpet is so thick it swallows sound whole. There's only one door, and it's slightly ajar, warm amber light pooling through the crack, and I can hear — voices. One low and controlled. One on the edge of collapse. I should knock. I know I should knock. Instead, I push the door open with my shoulder, because my hands are full and because the staff said priority and also because I am not thinking clearly tonight. I am running on bad coffee, a desperation and twenty-three hours and forty-something minutes. The room stops me cold. It is exactly what people call luxury. The windows were ceiling high, glass for being see-through and just from whhere I was standing, I can see the whole city. But that was not what caught my artention or stopped me in my tracks – it was Soren Vale. I recognize him the way you recognize a landmark. Impossible not to. He's on the cover of Forbes every other quarter, the kind of man that financial journalists describe as ruthless when they actually mean terrifying and visionary. Tall, dark-suited, jaw set like he was carved out of something expensive and cold. The Ice King. That's what they call him. Right now, the Ice King is being cornered by a woman in a champagne slip dress, mascara streaked down both cheeks, holding her phone up between them like a weapon. Which, I realize with a slow, sickening drop in my stomach, it is. "I have seventeen seconds of video, Soren." Her voice is shaking but her arm isn't. "Seventeen seconds that will end you. The board will pull out. The Singapore deal collapses. You know I'll do it." "Cassandra." His voice is so flat it barely qualifies as human. "Think carefully." "I have been thinking." A sob tears through the word. "You don't get to just —" She hears me. They both turn. The bottle in my hands suddenly weighs forty-two thousand dollars. I should apologize. Back out. Pretend I have the wrong room, which I clearly do, I clearly have the catastrophically wrong room — But Soren Vane looks at me. Not the way men at galas usually look at waitstaff, which is to speak through us, around us, past the tray and toward whoever's holding something more interesting. He looks at me directly. Assessing. His eyes move from my face to the door I came through to the hallway beyond and back to my face, and I watch something happen behind his expression — not warmth, not relief, something more like calculation snapping into place. He's not seeing me. He's seeing a variable. A solution. Something to use. Outside — far below, or maybe not so far, maybe right outside these windows — I hear it. Low at first, like static, then louder: the unmistakable swell of a crowd. Shouted questions. The white strobe-burst of camera flashes lighting up the glass forty-two floors up. Paparazzi. Someone tipped them off. Someone always tips them off. Cassandra's head turns toward the sound, and for one terrible second her face does something complicated — triumph and grief tangled together. "Perfect timing," she breathes. My phone buzzes. 23:41 remaining. I take one step backward. The door is right there. The hallway is right there. I can put the bottle down on the console table by the entrance and disappear back into the elevator and forget any of this happened, and maybe on the way down I can still catch Marcus Webb before he switches from champagne to something that makes him less sympathetic — Soren moves. He took four stridesacross the room, moving like a man who has never once in his life considered that he cannot get whatever he wants. His hand finds my waist before I could even say anything. It was firm, certain, proprietary in a way that makes every nerve ending I have fire at once — and he lowers his face so his mouth is at my ear-level. Then he spoke in a low and dangerous tone: "Don't scream, and I'll make sure you never have to work a day in your life again." I don't scream. I don't do anything. I think my lungs have forgotten their one job. Then we're moving — he's moving us, makingme backward through the door then into the hallway. I hear Cassandra shout something behind us but the elevator at the end of the corridor is already open and there are people pouring out of it. Cameras up, flashes going and the roar of voices crashing over me like a wave — His hand slides from my waist to my jaw. And then Soren Vane, the Ice King, the most untouchable man in any room he has ever stood in, kisses me. The world goes white. A hundred flashes. Maybe more. Somewhere in the back of what's left of my mind, I think: the bottle. I dropped the bottle. Forty-two thousand dollars. I am so completely destroyed.