Married to the wrong billionaire

CHAPTER THREE

AVA

The noise hit me before the light did.

Cameras don't sound the way movies make them sound. There's no single satisfying click. There's a hundred of them at once, overlapping, a swarm of shutters and shouted names and my own name being called by strangers who had no right to know it yet.

"Mrs. Van Doren! Over here!"

I flinched at the sound of it — my name, except it wasn't mine, not really, not yet, maybe not ever in any way that counted. Ethan's arm tightened slightly around mine, not painfully, just enough that I understood it as an instruction. Don't stop. Keep walking.

The plaza outside the Sable Room had been transformed in the time we were inside. A wall of photographers pressed against a barricade, phones and cameras raised over each other's heads, all of them fighting for the same fifteen feet of space. Beyond them, a scattering of onlookers had gathered too, drawn by the noise the way people are always drawn to something they don't understand yet but suspect is important.

"Smile," Ethan murmured again, the same word from the hallway, quieter this time, meant only for me.

I smiled. It felt like lying with my face instead of my mouth.

He steered us down the steps at a measured pace — not rushed, not slow, the exact speed of a man who had done this before and knew that hurrying only made a story look more like an escape. His hand found the small of my back again, the same place it had rested in the ceremony, and I hated how quickly my body had already learned to expect it there.

"Any comment on the change of groom?" someone shouted.

"How does it feel to marry the Van Doren heir instead?"

"Ava, look here — Ava!"

I kept my eyes forward, the way Ethan's were, fixed on some point past the barricade that didn't actually exist. I had spent years managing narratives for other people — quietly, from behind a desk, a phone pressed to my ear while I told some board member's assistant exactly what to say to make a crisis sound like a decision. I had never once imagined being the story myself.

Ethan stopped us at the base of the steps, just before the car. Just long enough.

He turned to me, and for one moment I thought he might say something — an instruction, a warning, anything to prepare me for whatever came next. Instead his hand came up and brushed a strand of hair back from my face, a small, unnecessary gesture that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with performance, and the cameras went wild for it.

Then he leaned down and kissed my temple. Not my mouth this time. Something quieter. Something that looked, to two hundred strangers with cameras, like tenderness.

I felt it more than I wanted to.

"That's enough for today," he said against my hair, low enough that only I could hear it. "Car's waiting."

We got in. The door shut, and the noise outside dulled to a hum through tinted glass, and for the first time in an hour I let my shoulders drop half an inch.

"You didn't have to do that," I said.

"Do what."

"The hair. The — " I gestured vaguely at my own temple, unable to say the word kiss out loud without it sounding like something it wasn't allowed to be. "Any of it."

"I told you. I need this to be convincing."

"To who? The board? The press?"

"Everyone," he said, and looked out the window instead of at me.

The car pulled away from the curb, and I watched the crowd shrink in the side mirror — flashes still going off even as we left, chasing a car they could no longer see into.

My phone buzzed in the small clutch I'd been given for the day, some new number already texting me, and when I checked it I found six missed calls from my mother and a single text from Chloe that read: I JUST SAW THE NEWS WHAT THE ACTUAL — CALL ME THE SECOND YOU CAN BREATHE.

I didn't call. I couldn't, not yet, not with him sitting two feet away from me in a car that smelled like leather and money and nothing like my old life.

"Your family's business," Ethan said, still looking out the window. "The Morgan. It'll stabilize. The optics of this marriage buy you time you didn't have this morning."

"Is that supposed to be comforting?"

"It's supposed to be true."

I studied his profile — the sharp line of his jaw, the way his hands sat perfectly still in his lap even now, when the worst of the public performance was behind us. He didn't fidget. He didn't check his phone. He simply existed inside his own composure like it was a room he'd built for himself a long time ago and had never once considered leaving.

"You didn't answer me," I said. "Before. At the altar. Why did you actually do this."

"I told you why."

"You told me the business reason. I'm asking the other one."

He turned, finally, and looked at me with an expression I couldn't read — not cold exactly, not warm either, something suspended in between that made me feel, for one unwelcome second, like he was deciding how much of the truth I was allowed to have.

"There isn't another one," he said.

I didn't believe him. I couldn't have told you why, not with anything concrete to point to — just some instinct, sharpened by years of reading rooms for a living, that told me a man like Ethan Van Doren did not upend his entire company's optics on a whim, for a stranger, purely because the math worked out.

Chloe texted again before I could push further. THIS PHOTO. ARE YOU OKAY. LOOK AT THIS.

I opened the link.

It was the moment on the steps — his hand brushing the hair back from my face, his mouth against my temple, my eyes half-closed in a way I hadn't planned and couldn't take back. Someone had caught it from an angle that made it look nothing like what it actually was. Not a performance. Not two strangers managing optics for a nervous board.

It looked like a man who couldn't help himself.

Already, in the twenty minutes since we'd left the plaza, it had been shared more times than I could count. The captions underneath it weren't asking whether the marriage was real. They were asking why anyone would ever doubt it.

I turned the phone toward Ethan without a word.

He looked at the image for a long moment. Longer than it should have taken to register a photograph. Something moved behind his eyes — not the flicker from the dressing room, something else, something closer to unease.

"That's not what happened," he said.

"I know what happened," I said. "The question is whether anyone looking at that photo is going to believe us."

He didn't answer. Outside the window, the city slid past in a blur of glass and grey light, and somewhere out there, a picture of the two of us was already becoming truer than the truth.