Tamed by the Ruthless Billionaire

Chapter 2- The Contract

Cassian

The papers rest on my desk at six in the morning the way I had them printed the night placed with the exactness I ask for everything in this building. Thirty-one pages. My lawyers wanted forty. I reduced it to thirty-one because I want her to be able to read every word herself in under an hour and I want there to be no place in it where a lie can hide.

Through the window behind my desk, the shadow of the Drake Tower stretches long. Blue across the water over the remains of the Ambrose Pressed Steel plant we built this building on top of. I kept the smokestack. My architects did not like it. They said it ruined the sightliness and said it did not match the glass. I told them the clash was the intention. Every person who walks into this building should understand in their body before their brain catches up that something old had to die for something to stand here.

My father understood that late. I understand that early.

Marcus calls my office at eight: fifteen. "Miss Vance is here."

"Send her in."

She walks in wearing gray. Not black, not the color a woman pretending to be a victim would choose. A flat, unornamented gray as she is dressed to match the sky over the river. Her hair is pulled back tight so that I can see the line of her jaw, and she is holding the contract in one hand already read, already marked up in three places with a blue pen.

I expected her to walk scared. She walks in like she is here to negotiate a business deal.

"You misnumbered the indemnification clause," she says, placing the papers on my desk and sliding them toward me with one finger. "Section 14.2 refers to 14.3. 14.3 Is actually 14. 4 … Your lawyers are careless, or they wanted me not to notice something hidden there."

I look down. She is correct. I did not catch it. I read every page myself.

"What did you think was hidden there?"

"Nothing, as it turns out. Just careless." She sits down across from me without being asked, crosses her legs and looks at me with an expression I can't immediately understand which never happens. "I have three changes."

"You don't get to make changes."

"Then you don't get a signature." She says in a tone, no drama the way you state a fact about the weather. "Clause nine says I give up any claim to assets if the marriage ends within five years for any reason, including reasons caused by you. I will agree to a five-year clause. I will not agree for any reason. If you have an affair, or you have me investigated, or you decide one day you are bored of your trophy, and you want a divorce, I will keep what is mine."

"There is no what is mine. You have a storage unit and a bracelet your mother left you."

Something moves across her face. Controlled, gone almost before I caught it but I caught it. I saved her mother’s death certificate in the background report Marcus did on her three days ago. Cancer, four years ago. Nobody from the Vance side at the funeral except Richard and he left before the reception, according to the obituary comments, to close on a boat he later had to sell.

I did that on purpose. Mentioning the bracelet. I wanted to see what would move behind her eyes when I touched something. It worked. I feel nothing that resembles satisfaction about that which's unusual, and I save the anomaly to examine later.

"Fine," I say. "What is mine stays mine if the marriage ends for any reason. If it ends because of something I do. Infidelity, abuse, breach of the terms I'm setting. You keep two million. The freedom to walk without a fight from my lawyers."

"Ten million."

"Four."

"Eight."

"Five. That is the number I am putting in the document in the next ten minutes or Richard finds out at 9 a.m. that the funds are calling the debt today instead of in six weeks."

She holds my eyes for three seconds. Most people break at two.

"Five, "she says. "What are the other terms?"

I stand, because sitting across a desk from her negotiating like we are closing a deal is doing something to the back of my neck I do not have a name for. Do not like not having a name. I want to be moving when I lay the rest of it out.

"In public we are the couple. Photographs, events, the press. You smile, you touch my arm, you make it convincing. You clearly have the discipline for it." I gesture at the contract between us at the blue-pen precision of her edits. "In private we live lives. Separate wings of the penthouse. You don't need to perform for me behind closed doors. I would prefer you don't try."

"That's it? Perform in public ignore each other in private?"

"That's it."

"No . . ." She pauses, searching for the word, and something in the pause tells me she is deciding whether to ask it out. "No expectation. Anything."

"None," I say before she finishes the sentence, because I want her to understand I heard the question underneath the question, and I am not going to make her spell it out. "I am not interested in forcing a woman into my bed to win a chess match against her stepfather. That is not what this is."

"Then what is it."

I look at her. Really look, the way I looked at her night in the ballroom right before I understood I had made a mistake letting myself find her interesting. And I decide, in the space of that look exactly how much truth to give her.

"It is a cage with lighting, "I say. "You will want for nothing. You will be protected in a way you have never been protected in your life. In exchange, every person who watches us together will understand that your stepfather traded you to me like livestock and there was nothing he could do to stop it."

She does not flinch. I watch for it. The tightening of the eyes, the swallow, any of the twenty things I have learned to read in twelve years of rooms like this one. And there is nothing. She picks the pen up, turns to the signature page and signs her name in the same small precise hand she used to mark up my lawyer’s mistakes.

"There," she says, sliding it back across the desk. "Cage. Good lighting. When do I move in?"

I look down at her signature. Elena Marie Vance, no hesitation in the ink. And something in my chest does a thing it has not done since I was nineteen years old. Watched them carry my father’s things out of a house we no longer owned. I do not have a word for it yet. I saved it the place I saved the thing that moved behind her eyes when I mentioned the bracelet and I told myself I will examine it later when it is less inconvenient.

"Tomorrow," I say. "Marcus will send the address. Bring what you want to keep. Everything else in that house belongs to your stepfathers’ creditors within the month."

She stands, smooths the front of her dress and looks at me one more time before she leaves. A long assessing look, the kind I usually give and rarely receive.

"You said this is a cage," she says. "You did not say who built it first. Him."

She leaves before I can answer. I stand at the window for a long time after the door clicks shut watching a barge cut a slow black line through the river and I do not have an answer. That bothers me more than it should.