THE BILLIONAIRE'S CONTRACTED VIRGIN

Chapter Four: The Benefit

My best friend Maribel had exactly one reaction to seeing me in a five-thousand-dollar gown over video call, and it was not the reaction I expected.

"Okay, but does he have a brother?" she said, squinting at her phone screen like she could climb through it. "Because I've been dating a man who thinks 'fancy dinner' means Olive Garden with a candle on the table, and I am ready for an upgrade."

"Mari."

"I'm serious. Tell him I'm available. Tell him I have references."

"He's not this isn't a real engagement," I said, for what felt like the hundredth time since I'd called her, mostly because saying it out loud kept me from thinking too hard about the ring still sitting on my finger, cool and steady, like it had always belonged there.

"Uh huh." Mari's face went soft in the way it always did right before she said something that cut a little too close to true. "Vivi. You've called me three times this week just to talk about a man you supposedly don't care about. That's not nothing."

"It's a contract."

"Contracts don't make you sound like *that* when you say his name."

I didn't have an answer for that, which was answer enough, and Mari mercifully, for once let it go, telling me instead to turn around so she could inspect the dress from the back, muttering something about how rich people's tailoring made her want to riot.

Simon drove me to the benefit alone; Ronan, I was told, would be meeting us there directly from a board meeting that had apparently eaten his entire afternoon. Simon spent most of the ride telling me, without being asked, exactly how to survive a room like the one I was about to walk into.

"Rule one," he said, eyes on the road, "don't answer any question that starts with 'so how did you two' honestly. Deflect. I'll teach you the deflect."

"You've done this before."

"I have watched three other women try and fail to survive this specific ballroom," he said, with the weary authority of a man who'd seen things. "You seem sturdier than the others. No offense to them. It's a hard room."

"Sturdier. Great. I'll put that on a business card."

"I mean it as a compliment," Simon said, and for the first time since I'd met him, something like genuine warmth broke through his careful professionalism. "He doesn't usually let people move into the penthouse this fast. For what it's worth."

I turned to look at him. "What does that mean?"

But we'd already pulled up to the entrance, and Simon infuriatingly just opened my door and offered a hand out of the car like the conversation hadn't happened at all.

The ballroom was exactly the kind of room Simon had warned me about: chandeliers doing their best impression of restraint, waitstaff moving like they'd been choreographed, and a hundred conversations happening at once, none of them about anything that mattered, all of them somehow still managing to sound like weapons.

I found Ronan near the bar, already surrounded — not by friends, I realized quickly, but by people orbiting him the way planets orbit something with enough gravity to hold them there against their will. He excused himself the moment he saw me, crossing the room with a focus that made the crowd around us seem to blur at the edges.

"You came," he said, low, just for me.

"You say that like I had a choice."

"You always have a choice," he said, and something about the seriousness in it caught me off guard. "You just keep choosing to show up anyway."

Before I could decide what to do with that, a woman appeared at his elbow like she'd been summoned by the sound of his voice tall, glittering, with the kind of smile that had clearly been perfected in front of a mirror for exactly this purpose.

"Ronan Steele. Engaged." She said it like a headline, tasting each word. "I didn't believe it until I saw the ring myself." Her eyes flicked to me, sweeping down and back up in under a second, cataloguing and dismissing in the same breath. "Isabelle Cross. I've known Ronan since we were children, which means I get certain privileges other people don't."

"Isabelle," Ronan said, in a tone that made it very clear the privileges were fewer than she believed.

"I'm only saying," Isabelle continued, undeterred, turning her smile fully on me now, sharp as a blade dressed up as a compliment, "it's refreshing. He usually goes for women who match the furniture. You're very" a pause, deliberate, cruel in the way only well-practiced cruelty can be "unexpected."

"I get that a lot," I said, keeping my voice light even as my stomach twisted. "Usually from people who've decided they know exactly who I am after thirty seconds."

Something flickered in Isabelle's eyes surprise, maybe, that the furniture had talked back and beside me, I felt more than saw Ronan's mouth twitch, the barest suggestion of something like pride he was working very hard not to show.

"Isabelle," he said again, and this time there was steel under it. "Don't."

"Relax, darling. I like her." Isabelle's smile shifted into something almost genuine, almost interesting, like she'd been testing me and I'd passed some exam I hadn't known I was taking. "Most of them cry. She didn't cry." She turned and vanished back into the crowd as suddenly as she'd appeared, leaving nothing behind but the faint sense that I'd just made either a friend or an enemy, and wouldn't know which for a while yet.

"She's a lot," I said.

"She's the only person in this room who's known me longer than she's feared me," Ronan said, watching Isabelle's retreating back with something complicated in his expression. "That earns certain allowances."

"Is that a euphemism for 'you two used to date'?"

"It's a euphemism for 'it's complicated, and not tonight.'" He said it easily enough, but there was a tightness around his eyes that told me not tonight meant not ever, if I can help it*, and I filed it away next to the phone call on the terrace and the sentence he still hadn't finished.

We danced, eventually, because the room seemed to expect it and because Ronan to my surprise didn't seem to hate it the way I'd assumed he would. His hand was warm at my waist, careful in a way that didn't match the rest of his reputation, and for a few minutes the noise of the ballroom fell away into something quieter, something that felt dangerously close to real.

"You handled Isabelle well," he said.

"I've had practice not letting people decide who I am."

"I noticed." His thumb moved, just slightly, against my back small, unconscious, the kind of gesture I was starting to understand was the closest thing he had to a confession. "I don't say things like this easily. But you're better at this than I expected you to be."

"Careful," I said. "Two compliments in one week. People might start thinking you're a decent man."

Something shadowed crossed his face at that, there and gone, quick enough that I almost missed it. "Don't mistake decent for uncomplicated, Vivian."

Before I could ask what he meant, a man I didn't recognize approached from the edge of the dance floor older, silver-haired, expensive in a quieter way than everyone else in the room, the kind of quiet that money buys when it's had generations to practice. He didn't address me at all. He looked only at Ronan, and whatever he said next, he said it low enough that I couldn't catch the words.

But I caught the effect. Ronan's whole body went rigid against mine, the warmth gone from his hand in an instant, replaced by something coiled and dangerous just beneath the surface.

"Excuse me," he said to me, already stepping back, already somewhere else entirely even though his feet hadn't moved yet. "I need a moment."

"Ronan—"

"I'll be right back." His voice was steady. His eyes weren't.

I watched him cross the ballroom with the silver-haired stranger, watched the two of them disappear through a side door that led, I assumed, toward somewhere private enough for whatever conversation this needed to be. And as the door swung shut behind them, I caught one last glimpse of Ronan's face in profile not the controlled, unreadable man from the conference room, not the quietly careful one from the terrace.

Something closer to fear.

I stood there in the middle of that glittering ballroom, in a dress that wasn't mine, wearing a ring that wasn't real, watching a closed door and trying to convince myself it was none of my business.

I didn't manage it. Not even a little.