The Billionaire's Stand-In Bride

CHAPTER4

The first public appearance was a Thursday night charity dinner, and Roman's stylist spent two hours on me as like I was a building being renovated.

I sat through it. I wasn't precious about clothes or makeup. But when the woman held up a dress that was essentially decorative and nothing else, I said, "I need to be able to sit in it without strategy."

She blinked.

"Something unique," I added. "I think better when I'm not worried about fabric."

She found something else. Navy. I looked like myself, which I hadn't expected to feel like a victory.

Roman was waiting in the living room when I came out. He was on his phone, one hand in his pocket, not looking up. Then he did look up.

He didn't say anything for a moment. Just looked at me the way he looked at things he was trying to understand, that focused, unhurried attention that I was starting to feel even when his eyes weren't on me.

"Will it work?" I asked. "For tonight."

"Yes." His voice came out quieter than usual. "It'll work."

He looked back at his phone, but not before I caught something moving across his face that made my pulse do something inconvenient. I looked away and told myself it was nothing.

In the car he briefed me. Names, relationships, who to avoid and why, which conversations to steer away from. He spoke quickly and clearly, and I absorbed it the way I absorbed data at work. Organized, categorized, filed.

"You're not writing any of this down," he said.

"I don't need to."

"Most people need to."

"I'm not most people."

He was quiet for a second. "No. You're not." He said it like he'd already decided that and was just confirming it out loud.

I looked out the window so he wouldn't see that it landed.

The dinner was exactly what I expected and nothing I was afraid of.

Forty people in an expensive room doing expensive performances by themselves. I'd grown up watching my mother work a room, which meant I'd seen every move before and knew what it cost the person making it. The approach. The compliment was really a question. The laugh that didn't reach anywhere.

I stayed close to Roman without making it obvious. He was good in rooms like this in a way that had nothing to do with effort. Controlled, present, never performing but somehow the most commanding person there anyway. People came to him. He never chased.

I was talking to a woman named Patricia, the wife of a board member, sharper than her pearls and twice as patient, when I felt Roman's hand settle at the small of my back.

It was practical. Married couple, public setting. I understood that.

It still moved through me like something electric, and I had to remind myself to keep my face still.

"Patricia," he said easily. "You've met Claire."

"Just now." Patricia looked between us with the eyes of a woman who had spent forty years reading rooms exactly like this one. "She was telling me about her work. You didn't mention your wife was in design."

"There's a great deal about Claire I'm still learning," he said.

He said it naturally, like a real answer, not a performance. But his hand was still on my back, and he'd said my name like it had a specific weight to it, and I had to concentrate very hard on Patricia's face to stay in the conversation.

She asked me something about materials and I answered and we talked for ten minutes and I felt Roman beside me the entire time, not interrupting, just there.

Later, moving between tables, he leaned down slightly to say something close to my ear.

"Patricia's husband controls three votes on the acquisition board. She liked you."

"She's smart. I just didn't pretend otherwise."

"Most people pretend otherwise. That's why she doesn't like most people."

I turned my head slightly, which put us closer than I'd intended. "Is that why you told me to avoid her in the car?"

He paused. "I said she was difficult."

"You said redirect if she gets personal. That means avoid." I kept my voice low. "But difficult people are just people who are tired of being managed. I don't manage people."

He looked at me for a moment. We were close enough that I could see something in his eyes that his composure usually covered over. Something warmer than the surface he showed rooms like this one.

"I'll remember that," he said.

"Add it to your file."

His mouth curved. "Already done."

I faced forward before I did something foolish like smile back at him.

In the car going home, I took off my heels and held them in my lap. My feet hurt, and I was finished pretending they didn't.

Roman glanced down. Said nothing.

"I know," I said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was going to say you handled tonight well." A pause. "The heels are irrelevant."

I looked at him. "You're surprisingly easy to be around. Has anyone told you that?"

"No." No hesitation. Just no.

"That's because you don't let people close enough to find out," I said without thinking, then felt the old pull to walk it back and swallowed it down. I was done apologizing for things that were just true.

He didn't look away. "And yet here you are."

"Here I am. Six days married to a man I didn't know existed eight days ago."

"Does that frighten you?"

I thought about it honestly. I turned it over the way I turned over numbers that didn't immediately make sense. "It should. But you haven't given me a reason to be afraid of you yet."

"Yet," he repeated.

"I like to be precise."

He almost laughed. I felt it more than I heard it. A shift in his chest, something briefly loosening in his jaw. Half a second and then he was composed again, but I'd seen it. I'd cataloged it without meaning to.

I wanted to make it happen again.

That thought arrived without warning and I closed the door on it quickly, firmly, the way you shut a drawer that has no business being open.

"Get some sleep tonight," he said as we pulled up to the building. "You have work tomorrow and I need you at the Halcyon lunch on Friday."

"Romantic."

"I'm not trying to be romantic, Claire."

"I know." I picked up my heels and reached for the door. "That's the only reason I said it."

I was in the elevator before I let myself breathe properly.

And I was almost entirely sure that when the doors closed, I heard him exhale too.