A Bride For Him

CHAPTER 2: The Man in the Hallway

Ruby

Three months in a private estate in the middle of nowhere, working as a live-in nurse for an eighty-two-year-old woman dying of terminal pancreatic cancer.

I applied before I could talk myself out of it.

My parents were against it from the moment I told them.

My mother cried. My father did the thing where he doesn’t cry, but his voice goes very quiet and very slow, which is somehow worse.

“Ruby, we are not that desperate,” he said.

My father owns a small furniture business in Brooklyn. Or more accurately, he owns a small furniture business that's being slowly strangled by rising rent, supplier costs, and landlords who seem to think small businesses should be grateful for the privilege of existing.

This year alone, his lease went up, his lumber supplier raised prices twice, and his customers discovered that a big-box chain can sell a dining table for less than what it costs him just to buy the wood.

“Ruby, you are not going to move into a stranger’s house to take care of an elderly woman,” Mom said.

Dad was worse. He stared at the job advertisement, then at me, then back at the advertisement, as though he were trying to identify the criminal responsible for putting it online.

His jaw tightened.

The pay was more than I could earn in six months of juggling part-time shifts around my classes at NYU.

I’m twenty-two, a business major, and I know enough about cash flow to understand that my parents’ business is in trouble. I also know my parents well enough to understand that they would rather sell their kidneys than ask me for help.

Besides, the work wasn’t foreign to me.

I’d spent my high school weekends volunteering at a local hospice, where I learned that caring for someone was about more than checking medication schedules and helping them move from one place to another. Sometimes it meant listening to the same story three times. Sometimes it meant sitting quietly beside someone who didn’t want to be alone.

Eventually, I took a certified elderly-care course before starting college. I knew I was qualified for the position. I wasn’t applying because I thought it would be easy. I was applying because I knew I could do it.

The timing was almost too perfect. With exactly two days remaining until the semester ended, the three-month assignment fit neatly into my upcoming break.

My parents still hated the idea.

I applied anyway.

Two weeks passed. Then three.

I stopped checking my email for anything other than syllabi and NYU’s endless requests that I “get involved on campus.”

Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognise.

No name. No area code I could place.

I almost let it go to voicemail. I was folding laundry and mentally rehearsing an argument with a professor about a grade I didn’t agree with. But something—boredom, instinct, or a temporary lapse in judgment—made me pick up.

“Is this Ruby Barkley?”

The voice belonged to a woman. Clipped and formal.

“Speaking.”

“My name is Diane Whitaker. I’m calling concerning Mrs. Sullivan, regarding the live-in care position you applied for.”

I stopped folding.

The shirt in my hands hung there, one sleeve turned inside out.

“Yes?” I said.

“Mrs. Sullivan would like to offer you the live-in care position.”

“Sorry,” I said. “The position. As in—I have it?”

“Yes. We’d like you to start as soon as you’re able. I’ll email the details.”

I stared at the laundry in my lap.

“There’s no interview?”

“No,” she said, as though the question were mildly beside the point. “That won’t be necessary.”

She hung up before I could ask anything else.

So here I am, standing before a man who looks like he was sculpted by a master artist with a personal vendetta against my pulse rate. But it turns out, world-class bone structure and a custom-tailored suit have done absolutely nothing for his personality.

“Are you lost,” he says, his voice a deep, icy baritone that cuts right through the air, “or do you always stand in hallways gawking like a stray farm animal?”

His sharp hazel eyes are racking me with an intense, suffocating heat and his mouth hardens into a contemptuous line.

I blink, my brain stalling out under the sheer, suffocating weight of his disrespect. The insult lands somewhere just under my ribs, hot and immediate.

He c***s one dark eyebrow, looking down at me as if I’ve just been dragged out of a gutter.

“Funny,” I say before I can stop myself. “I was about to ask the same thing. You’re the one shouting loud enough to be heard through solid oak.”

The man c***s one dark eyebrow, looking down at me as if I’ve just spoken to him in ancient Aramaic.

Something shifts in his expression. For a fraction of a second, his hazel eyes widen, a flash of genuine shock rippling across his features before giving way to a dark, dangerous spark of annoyance.

He takes a step toward me, enough to erase the space between us, leaving me with the sudden, infuriating awareness of how much taller he is. I have to tilt my chin to keep looking at him, which I resent almost as much as the way my pulse picks up.

His gaze moves over my face, slow and assessing.

Then he takes another step.

I refuse to move.

He stops in front of me, close enough that I catch the warmth of his body and the clean, expensive scent of his cologne. Something woody, with a faint trace of citrus beneath it. It fills my lungs when I inhale. Entirely too distracting.

He leans in closer, and my stomach gives a treacherous little flip. I can feel the heat of his breath against the side of my face before his mouth reaches my ear. His warm breath grazes my ear like a threat.

“Careful,” he whispers. “No one talks to me like that.”

His voice has dropped into something colder, quieter, somehow worse than the shouting. It makes the tiny hairs along my arms rise. An unwanted shiver slips down my spine.

I turn my head just enough to look at him.

“How lovely for you,” I say sweetly. “Now, if you’re finished obstructing the hallway with your aggressive posturing, some of us have actual work to do.”

His jaw ticks. I've gotten under his skin. Good. Now we both have something in common.

His gaze drops to my lips for a terrifyingly brief second before snapping back to my eyes, hot and utterly exasperated.

With a cold, calculated sneer, he sidesteps me with absolute grace, his shoulder brushing mine just enough to leave my skin burning, and strides down the corridor, his polished shoes clicking in a precise, furious rhythm.

He doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t even break stride. But the clicking of his shoes falters, just once, like a skipped heartbeat, before resuming its furious rhythm down the corridor.

I count that as a win.

The faint woody-citrus scent of his cologne lingers in the air where he’d stood.

I exhaled slowly through my nose and forced myself to move.