The CEO's Contract Wife

The dress was three sizes too small and Elena Marsh was fairly certain it was cutting off circulation to her brain, because that was the only explanation for why she was standing in a church vestibule at 11:58 a.m., listening to a wedding planner's nightmare unfold in real time. It was not, technically, her dress. It was the backup gown from the bridal boutique, delivered at nine that morning in the wrong size after the real one had arrived with a split seam no seamstress could fix in time. Elena had zipped herself into it to check the hem drop while she steamed the skirt, telling herself she'd be out of it in five minutes. That had been an hour ago. Then Priya had come sprinting down the corridor with her face the color of paper, and the last hour of Elena's ordinary life had ended. "She's gone," hissed Priya, the bride's maid of honor, gripping Elena's arm hard enough to bruise. "Camille is gone. Her car's still in the parking lot, her phone's off, and there are four hundred people in that church including four members of the Whitfield board and a groom who does not do public humiliation well." The champagne was sweating in its bucket. The makeup artist sat on the edge of the chaise with a brush in each hand, too stunned to cry. Camille's veil lay across the vanity like a shed skin, and the window at the end of the room stood wide open to the sound of traffic. No note. No message. Just a woman-shaped absence in a room that still smelled like her perfume. "Okay." Elena kept her voice level, the way she always did when a wedding started sliding off its rails at the worst possible moment. She'd talked a mother of the bride out of setting fire to a seating chart once. She could handle this. "Okay. We call it. We tell the groom—" "We can't tell the groom." Priya's eyes were wild. "Do you understand who Damian Cross is? This merger with Whitfield Holdings has been eighteen months in the making. His grandmother flew in from Geneva. If this wedding doesn't happen today, in front of these specific people, the deal dies, and Camille's father loses everything he's put into Whitfield. She knew that. She left anyway." Elena glanced through the crack in the vestibule doors. The pews were packed shoulder to shoulder. Ushers in identical gray waistcoats stood with their hands folded, wearing the fixed smiles of men who'd been told everything was fine. At the front of the church, the organist had been vamping the same eight bars of Pachelbel for ten minutes, on Elena's orders, and even from here she could see the poor man's shoulders creeping toward his ears. The radio clipped to her waistband hissed with a dozen frantic voices. Do we seat the last guests? Is the bride ready? The photographer wants to know if he should start. Elena had answered every question for six years with the same calm, confident voice. Today she turned the volume dial to zero and let the static die. Elena had been hired three weeks ago to fix a color-scheme disaster, not to referee a corporate hostage situation dressed as a wedding. "So what exactly do you want me to do about it?" Priya's fingers dug in harder. "The Whitfield board is in the third pew. Camille's father is in the first, and he cannot know she's gone, not until the papers are signed. He'll pull every dollar. Damian Cross will lose eighteen months of work in an afternoon, and four hundred people at Whitfield will find out on Monday that they don't have jobs." "That is not my problem to solve." "I know." Priya's voice cracked. "I know it isn't. But you're standing here, and I've run out of people who are." Priya looked at her. Really looked at her — at the dress Elena had thrown on that morning to steam out a wrinkle before the ceremony, a dress that was, Elena realized with dawning horror, a near-identical ivory silk to the one hanging ruined and unworn in the bridal suite. At her dark hair, twisted up the same way Camille wore hers for photos. At her five-foot-six frame, which happened to be exactly Camille's height. "No," Elena said. "You don't have to say vows that count. It's not — nobody's asking you to actually marry him." "Priya." "It's twenty minutes. You walk down the aisle, the deal doesn't die today, and tomorrow everyone finds a very boring, very private way to explain that the bride had a family emergency. Nobody has to know it wasn't her at the altar. The veil is heavy. Nobody will see your face until it's done, and by then—" "By then what? I'm supposed to just stand there while a stranger puts a ring on my finger?" Behind them, the string quartet stopped tuning. A hush moved through the church like weather. "Ten thousand dollars," Priya said, low and fast. "On top of what we already owe you. Elena, I am begging you. I have known you for six years. I would not ask if there were any other option." Elena looked once more through the gap in the doors. At the far end of the church, a tall man in a dark suit stood at the altar with his back to her, perfectly straight, perfectly still, waiting for a bride who was never going to come. She couldn't see his face. She didn't need to. She could see the way the whole room was leaning toward him, watching for the crack. Every rule she'd ever lived by told her this was a terrible idea. Wedding planners did not stand in for brides. They did not lie to four hundred guests, and they did not take ten thousand dollars to become a footnote in someone else's disaster. Elena thought about her father's last hospital bill, the one that still had a red PAST DUE stamped across the top of it sitting on her kitchen counter. She thought about Ryan's tuition payment due in eleven days. She thought about the particular flavor of panic in Priya's voice, the kind that came from watching your whole career catch fire in front of you. "It's not a real wedding," Elena said, mostly to herself. "It's not a real wedding," Priya agreed, already reaching for the veil. The veil went over her head, and the world turned soft and white and far away. --- The doors swung open. Somewhere behind her, Priya exhaled a shaky, grateful breath, and the organist, released at last from Pachelbel, launched into the processional with the relief of a man let out of prison. Elena felt the whole church rise to its feet with a sound like a wave breaking. Her knees, traitors, went liquid. She locked them, lifted the ridiculous roses, and stepped over the threshold into a life that wasn't hers. The aisle was longer than it looked from a distance. Elena had walked hundreds of them, always a few steps behind the bride with a clipboard and an earpiece, never in front, never the one everyone stood up for. She kept her eyes down, the way you were supposed to for a first look, and let the illusion do its work — the dress, the veil, the flowers Priya had shoved into her hands at the last second. The bouquet was white roses and eucalyptus, tidy and lifeless, nothing she would ever have chosen. Her heart was beating so hard it made the petals tremble. Four hundred faces turned toward her. She felt them like heat. Through the veil, the church swam in pieces: a flash of diamonds, a man's gray suit, a woman dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. She thought absurdly of every bride she'd ever sent down an aisle. She'd always whispered the same thing at the doors. Breathe. Just walk toward the good part. She had never once wondered what it cost to actually do it. In the front pew, a silver-haired man in a morning coat turned to watch her pass. Camille's father, Priya had said. His eyes moved over the white silk and the veil, and his face softened into a look of such uncomplicated pride that Elena's stomach dropped straight through the floor. He believed it. He believed every inch of it. She kept her chin level and her steps even and did not let herself think about what that meant. She didn't look up until she reached the altar, until the officiant said something about the joining of two families, until it was too late to do anything but keep walking toward the man standing there. Damian Cross was taller than she'd expected, and colder. Not unkind exactly — his face gave away nothing at all, which was somehow worse. Dark suit, dark eyes, a jaw that looked like it had never once relaxed. He did not look like a man about to marry someone he loved. He looked like a man closing a business deal, which, Elena supposed, he was. His hands were folded in front of him, perfectly still. Elena, who spent her life reading nervous grooms, noticed that he did not fidget, did not sway, did not so much as glance at the doors. He simply waited, like a man who'd decided long ago that feelings were a liability and had structured his whole life accordingly. She lifted the veil back when the officiant instructed her to. Damian Cross's expression did not change. That was the first strange thing. The second strange thing was the flicker, so brief she almost missed it, of something sharpening behind his eyes — recognition that this face was wrong, followed immediately by a decision, made in less than a second, to say nothing at all. He knew. He knew she wasn't Camille, and he said nothing. "Damian Cross," the officiant said, "do you take this woman—" "I do," Damian said, before the sentence was even finished, his eyes locked on Elena's with an intensity that made her pulse stutter. The officiant turned to her. Elena's mouth had gone dry. Beside the altar, in the front row, an elegant older woman in emerald green watched her with sharp, assessing eyes that missed nothing — Sophia Cross, Elena would learn later, though right now she was simply the most frightening person Elena had ever seen smile. "Do you take this man—" The officiant's voice rolled on, warm and practiced, and Elena barely heard it. She was counting. Four hundred guests. Four board members. One father. One groom who hadn't looked away from her since she lifted the veil. And underneath all of it, small and stubborn, the memory of a red stamp on a hospital bill, reminding her exactly what kind of month she was having. There was a version of this moment where Elena turned around. Where she said there's been a mistake and let the whole thing collapse in front of four hundred witnesses and let Priya deal with the wreckage. She had about two seconds to choose it. "I do," she heard herself say. The rest of it went by in fragments. The officiant said something about rings. Damian took one from his best man and slid it onto her finger without looking away from her face; it was a fraction too small, and it stuck at her knuckle before it gave. Camille's ring, Elena realized, from a hand that wasn't hers. Then the officiant, sensing the room's rising impatience, skipped ahead to the announcement, and Damian lifted her hand and pressed it briefly to his lips, cool and correct, for the cameras. The church erupted in applause. Somewhere a photographer's flash went off. And Elena Marsh, wedding planner, became, in the eyes of the law and four hundred witnesses, Mrs. Damian Cross.