Bound by hate, undone by him

Chapter 7 Second thoughts

Celeste couldn't sleep.

She lay in bed staring at the ceiling for what felt like hours, her mind circling the same handful of thoughts over and over until they blurred together into something closer to noise than reason. The signature on that contract. The wedding date, now barely three weeks away. The cold, assessing way Lucien had looked at her across his desk, like she was a clause he was still deciding whether to keep.

"I hope I don't regret this," she muttered into the darkness, though there was no one there to hear it but herself.

Somewhere around midnight, she gave up on sleep entirely and made her way downstairs, hoping a glass of water and a change of scenery might quiet her thoughts. Instead, she found the kitchen light already on, and her grandfather sitting at the table with a cup of tea in front of him, wide awake despite the hour.

"Grandpa? What are you doing up?"

"Could ask you the same thing." He gestured to the chair across from him, and she sat, pulling her cardigan tighter around herself. "How are you, Celeste?"

"I'm fine, Grandpa. How are you feeling?"

"Better, dear. Much better." He did look better, she noticed, some of the color returned to his face that had been missing just days ago. Whatever weight had lifted off him since she'd made her decision seemed to be doing more for his health than any medication the doctor had prescribed. "Calloway called this morning."

"Oh?"

"He said he'd release the funds a week before the wedding. Everything's arranged on his end."

"Fair enough." She couldn't quite keep the sarcasm out of her voice. "Let me guess. He's sponsoring the venue, the dress, the cake, all of it too?"

"All of it." Her grandfather studied her over the rim of his teacup, his earlier lightness fading into something more serious. "Celeste. Are you certain you want to do this? There's no turning back once it's set in motion. I need to hear you say it, not just imply it."

"I'm certain, Grandpa."

"I was told you met Lucien already." He set his cup down, watching her with the careful attentiveness he always used when he suspected she was hiding something, which, admittedly, she usually was. "Do you like him?"

Celeste hesitated, the question landing somewhere she hadn't fully examined yet. "Yeah. I guess."

He let out a laugh, the first genuine one she'd heard from him in what felt like weeks, warm and a little knowing. "You guess. That's about as convincing as I've ever heard you sound about anything, Celeste. You've had impossibly high standards for men since you were seventeen years old and turned down the captain of the debate team because his shoes were, in your exact words, aggressively unserious."

"They were terrible shoes, Grandpa."

"I'm sure they were." His smile lingered, though something more thoughtful crept into his expression as he watched her. "I only want you to be honest with yourself about what you're walking into. Even if the arrangement is what it is, you deserve to know your own heart in the middle of it."

It's really happening now, she thought, staring down at her own hands wrapped around the water glass she hadn't touched. Three weeks from now, she would be someone's wife. Not out of love, not out of any of the reasons her grandmother used to talk about when she told stories of meeting Grandpa Whitmore at a company function decades ago and knowing, almost instantly, that he was the one. Just paperwork. Just a deal, dressed up in white lace for the sake of appearances.

How could she possibly like Lucien, of all people? He was cold enough to make a room feel ten degrees colder just by walking into it, sarcastic in a way that left her scrambling for a response half a second too late every single time, controlling to a degree that made her wonder how his employees survived working for him at all. She thought of the way he'd barely looked up from his paperwork when she signed away a year of her life, the flat, bored sit he'd offered instead of a real greeting.

Thank God for the contract. Thank God for the clean, clinical terms they'd both agreed to, the guaranteed expiration date stamped invisibly over the whole arrangement. One year. She could survive one year of anything, even Lucien Gray's particular brand of icy arrogance, as long as she knew exactly when it would end.

She could not, she was fairly certain, have survived him for a lifetime.

And yet.

Some small, treacherous part of her mind kept circling back to his cologne, to the way his eyes had held hers just a beat too long across that desk, to the almost-smile that had tugged at his mouth when she'd muttered how romantic under her breath. She pushed the thought away as soon as it surfaced, annoyed with herself for even entertaining it.

"Celeste."

Her grandfather's voice pulled her back to the present, and she blinked, realizing she'd drifted somewhere deep inside her own head without noticing.

"Sorry. What did you say?"

"I said," he repeated gently, a knowing look settling over his features, "you were somewhere very far away just now. Somewhere that put a very particular expression on your face."

"It's nothing," she said quickly, reaching for her water glass to give her hands something to do besides betray her further. "Just thinking about wedding planning. It's a lot to organize in three weeks."

Her grandfather said nothing, though the small, knowing smile he wore over the rim of his teacup told her he didn't believe a word of it.

"Go back to bed, Celeste," he said finally, patting her hand across the table. "Whatever you're carrying tonight, it'll still be there in the morning. No use losing sleep twice over the same worry."

She managed a small smile of her own, grateful, as always, for the quiet way he always seemed to know exactly what she needed without demanding she explain herself. "Goodnight, Grandpa."

"Goodnight, dear."

She climbed the stairs back to her room, but sleep, when it finally came, brought with it the faint, unwelcome memory of a cologne.