The CEO's Contract Wife

Chapter 4: Moving In

The car Damian sent arrived at four o'clock exactly, driven by a silent man named Felix who loaded Elena's single suitcase into the trunk with the careful attention most people reserved for handling something breakable. She'd packed everything she owned that mattered in under an hour — it hadn't taken long, once she started being honest with herself about how little of her old apartment she actually needed. Her father's watch. A framed photo of her and Ryan at his high school graduation. Three boxes of client files she refused to leave behind, contract or no contract.

Felix didn't make conversation, which suited her fine, because she spent the entire drive with her forehead nearly pressed to the window, watching the city climb higher and glassier the closer they got to the address on the paperwork. By the time the car pulled beneath a discreet portico she recognized from a dozen magazine spreads she'd flipped past in waiting rooms, her stomach had folded itself into something small and tight.

The Cross penthouse took up the top three floors of a building Elena had walked past a hundred times without ever imagining she'd live in it, and it was, she decided within ten minutes of the tour, entirely too large for one emotionally repressed billionaire and his skeleton staff.

Damian met her in the lobby himself, which she hadn't expected — she'd half assumed a man like him simply materialized inside his own elevators — and the doorman greeted him by name with the easy familiarity of someone who'd been doing it for years. The elevator required a key card and a six-digit code, both of which he handed over without ceremony, as though giving a virtual stranger the code to his home was the most unremarkable transaction in the world.

"Memorize it and don't write it down anywhere," he said. "Not even in your phone."

"Should I be worried about who's trying to get in?"

"You should be careful. There's a difference." He didn't elaborate, and something in his tone told her not to ask twice, not yet.

The elevator opened directly into a foyer with ceilings so high her footsteps seemed to vanish upward before they finished echoing. Damian walked her through it briskly — a formal living room she suspected had never once been sat in, a kitchen with two of everything and a marble island long enough to seat twelve, a library with a rolling ladder that looked ornamental rather than functional, a dining room dominated by a table clearly built for exactly the kind of forty-eight-hour-notice functions Clause Fourteen had warned her about.

"How many people actually live here?" she asked, trailing a hand along the back of a couch that had probably never known the weight of a human body.

"Before you, just me. Occasionally my grandmother, when she stays over rather than driving back to the estate." He said it without any apparent awareness of how strange the sentence sounded, one man rattling around three floors built for a family that had never materialized. "Mrs. Alvarez comes in during the day. There's a housekeeping staff twice a week, and a chef on Thursdays and Sundays, otherwise I manage."

"You cook?"

"Badly. But I manage."

That, more than anything he'd said in the conference room that morning, was the first thing that made her laugh — a short, surprised sound she hadn't planned on, and it seemed to catch him as off guard as it caught her.

They continued down a long hallway lined with black-and-white photographs — skylines, mostly, a few architectural studies, nothing personal, nothing that told her anything true about the man walking beside her — until he stopped at a door near the end and pushed it open.

"Your room," Damian said, opening a door onto a space bigger than her old apartment, all soft grays and floor-to-ceiling windows, a bed that could have comfortably slept four, and a walk-in closet larger than the bedroom she'd grown up sharing with Ryan. Late afternoon light poured across the hardwood in long gold bars, and somewhere thirty floors below, the city moved in complete, indifferent silence behind double-glazed glass.

"It's a lot," she admitted, turning in a slow circle.

"It's a room. I'd rather you have too much space than too little." He gestured toward a door set into the far wall, half-hidden by the angle of a bookshelf she doubted he'd ever filled himself. "Adjoining door to mine locks from your side. I had it changed this morning."

"You changed a lock for me."

"You said trust mattered. Locks are a start." He said it simply, like it wasn't a small, deliberate kindness folded into an otherwise transactional morning, and moved on before she could examine it further. "Mrs. Alvarez runs the house. She knows the arrangement — the real one, not the public one. She's discreet."

"How many people know the real one?"

"Mrs. Alvarez. My lawyer. You. That's the list, and I intend to keep it short."

As if summoned by her own name, a woman appeared in the doorway a moment later — sixty-something, silver-haired, dressed with the crisp efficiency of someone who ran a household the way other people ran companies. She looked Elena over once, thoroughly, and whatever she concluded seemed to satisfy her.

"Mrs. Cross," she said, and the title landed strangely on Elena's ears, still too new to feel like it belonged to her. "I'll have the kitchen stocked with whatever you prefer by tomorrow morning. If you'll write me a list."

"You don't have to do that. I can shop for myself."

"I'm aware you can, dear. That's not really the point." Mrs. Alvarez's mouth twitched, not quite a smile, and Elena had the distinct impression she'd just passed some kind of test without knowing the rules. "Mr. Cross tells me you'll be keeping your business. Good. This house has had entirely too many women in it with nothing to do but wait for him to come home."

"Thank you, Rosa," Damian said, in a tone that was equal parts affection and warning, and the housekeeper let herself out with a knowing look Elena decided not to examine too closely.

Alone again, Elena crossed to the window and looked out at a view she still couldn't quite believe belonged to her, temporarily or otherwise — the river a dark ribbon in the distance, the lights just beginning to prick on across the skyline as the afternoon burned down toward evening. Somewhere out there was her old apartment, her old life, a version of herself who'd woken up that morning worried about nothing more complicated than a florist's invoice. She wondered, not for the first time that day, whether that version of Elena would recognize the one standing here now.

Elena set her single suitcase — embarrassingly small next to the closet space he was offering her — on the bed and looked around at a life she hadn't asked for and now, somehow, owned an entire wing of.

She unzipped it slowly, laying things out across the enormous bed one at a time — three work blazers, a stack of client folders, the framed photograph of her and Ryan, her father's watch, which she set carefully on the nightstand where she'd see it first thing every morning. It looked absurd against the sleek modern furniture, a small scratched thing that had survived a hospital room and a funeral and was now being asked to survive a billionaire's penthouse too. She left it exactly where it was anyway. "What about your grandmother?"

Damian's jaw tightened, just slightly. "Sophia believes this is real. I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible."

"That feels like a lot to ask someone to lie to, forever, about her own grandson's marriage."

"It's not forever. It's twelve months." He said it like a fact he'd recited to himself enough times to believe it. "She's ill, Elena. The stress of the truth would do more damage than the comfort of the lie. I've made my peace with that trade."

"What's wrong with her? If you don't mind my asking."

"Heart condition. Arrhythmia, mostly, though her doctors use longer words when they think I'm not listening closely enough to argue with them." He said it flatly, a fact filed away and handled the way he seemed to handle everything difficult — by making it smaller, more manageable, something that could fit inside a sentence instead of a life. "She's stubborn about it. Refuses to slow down, refuses to retire from the board, refuses to admit that stress makes it worse. My getting married and settling down was supposed to be one less thing for her heart to worry about."

"Instead you handed her a happier lie instead of a harder truth."

"Something like that." He looked at her carefully, like he was deciding how much further to let the conversation go. "She's difficult and brilliant and she raised me after my parents decided the company mattered more than either of their children. I'd do considerably more than lie about a marriage to keep her from worrying herself into an early grave."

There was something underneath the statement she didn't have the right to ask about yet — a grief he'd folded into careful sentences the same way he folded everything else — but she recognized the shape of it anyway, because she'd spent the last year of her father's illness doing exactly the same math.

"Okay," she said, softer than she meant to. "I won't push."

"One more thing," Elena said, before he could leave her to unpack entirely. "House rules. I don't mean the contract kind. I mean — do you actually eat breakfast, or is that a rumor? Do I need to warn you before I have a client over? Is there a version of normal life I'm supposed to be performing here, or are we just improvising as we go?"

"Breakfast is real, usually early, usually alone in the kitchen before anyone else is awake. Client visits are fine, within reason — I'd just ask for a day's notice if it's someone who might recognize the address and talk." He considered the rest of her question seriously, the way he seemed to consider everything. "As for the rest — I don't know. I've never done this before either. I suppose we're improvising."

"That's either the most honest thing you've said all day, or the most terrifying."

"Both, probably," he said, and for once didn't try to soften it into something more comfortable.

He looked at her like that surprised him. "Most people push."

"I'm not most people. I'm your wife, apparently. Try to keep up."

He lingered a moment longer than the conversation required, one hand braced against the doorframe, as though there were something else he meant to say and had decided against it. Then he simply nodded once, the small formal gesture of a man closing out a meeting, and stepped back into the hallway.

The almost-smile again — she was starting to count them, which was its own small alarm bell she chose to ignore — and he left her to unpack in a room three times the size of anywhere she'd ever slept, in a life that had, in the space of thirty-six hours, become entirely unrecognizable. Somewhere down the hall, she could hear the faint, domestic clatter of Mrs. Alvarez starting on dinner, and for one disorienting moment it almost sounded like the beginning of an ordinary life instead of the strangest arrangement she'd ever agreed to.