Married to the wrong billionaire

CHAPTER TWO

AVA

His hand didn't move from where it hung between us, waiting.

I looked at it for one more second, then I took it. His grip closed around mine, warm despite everything about him that looked cold, and just like that I was being led out of the anteroom and down a hallway I didn't remember walking through the first time.

The doors to the Sable Room opened, and two hundred faces turned toward us at once.

I heard the noise before I understood it — a ripple of confusion, a few gasps, someone's chair scraping back. The music the string quartet had been playing faltered and then caught itself, awkwardly, a beat too late. I kept my eyes forward and my spine straight, because that was the only thing left that I could control.

Ethan didn't slow down. He walked me straight up the aisle like the last twenty minutes hadn't happened, like there was nothing strange at all about the groom being an entirely different man than the one printed on the programs currently sitting in two hundred laps.

I caught my mother's face as we passed. She looked like she was doing the math on whether to stand up and stop this. She didn't. My father's hand was on her arm.

At the altar, the officiant — a small, flustered man who had clearly been given about ninety seconds of warning — cleared his throat twice before he found his voice.

"We are gathered here," he began, and then stopped, glancing at Ethan like he was waiting for permission to keep going.

Ethan gave him a single nod.

I stood there in my dress that didn't fit right and my hair pinned so tight I couldn't feel my scalp anymore, and I let the words wash past me. *Do you take this woman.* I wasn't listening for meaning. I was listening for it to be over.

When it was my turn, I said yes because the alternative was standing in front of my parents' entire social and financial future and saying no, and I had spent my whole life being the one who didn't let things collapse. I said yes to a stranger with pale blue eyes and a jaw that never seemed to unclench, and some far-off part of me understood that I would need to sit with what I'd just done later, in private, where no one could watch me do it.

He said yes like it was a business decision. Because it was.

The ring he slid onto my finger was heavier than I expected, and colder, like it had been kept somewhere without warmth. I didn't look down at it. I was too busy not crying.

"You may kiss the bride."

I hadn't thought about this part. In the chaos of the last half hour I had somehow skipped straight past the part where I would have to actually touch this man in front of everyone I knew.

Ethan turned to me. For one second his expression didn't do the thing it had done in the dressing room — the flicker of something I couldn't name. It went back to flat, unreadable, a man doing what needed to be done.

His hand found the small of my back. Firm. Certain. Not gentle, exactly, but not careless either — like he'd already decided how this was going to look before he'd decided to do it.

Then he kissed me.

It was short. It had to be, for the both of us to survive it. But it wasn't nothing, and that terrified me more than the ceremony itself had. I felt it in my chest, some unwelcome jolt of electricity that had no business existing between two people who had known each other for less than an hour.

He pulled back before I could decide what to do with that feeling. Two hundred people were on their feet, applauding, because that is what people do at weddings regardless of what they actually just witnessed. Somewhere near the back, I heard the click and whir of a camera shutter, rapid-fire, and I understood, distantly, that this moment was no longer mine. It belonged to whoever printed the papers tomorrow.

Ethan's hand stayed at my back as we turned to face the room. I could feel the heat of it through the fabric of my dress, steady in a way nothing else about the last hour had been.

"Smile," he said, quiet enough that only I could hear it.

"I am smiling."

"You're not."

I fixed it. Whatever was on my face, I fixed it, because I had spent a lifetime fixing my face for other people's comfort and this was, apparently, no different.

The applause went on. Someone called out congratulations. My mother was crying, and I couldn't tell if it was happiness or grief, and I suspected she couldn't either.

As we walked back down the aisle together, married, his hand never leaving my back, I did the math the way I always did the math — quickly, quietly, without letting it show on my face.

There was no version of tonight where I walked out of this building and back into my old life. There was no clause I hadn't already read, no relative who would step in, no version of events where The Morgan survived without this. I had looked for every exit before I'd ever put on this dress, and I had closed every single one of them myself, chapter by chapter, decision by decision, long before Ethan Van Doren had ever walked through that door.

I was married to a stranger. The cameras were still flashing. And somewhere outside these doors, the whole world was about to find out.

At the end of the aisle, before the doors to the hallway swallowed us, I risked one glance up at him. He wasn't looking at the crowd anymore. He was looking straight ahead, jaw set, like a man walking into a boardroom rather than out of a wedding.

"That's it?" I asked, under my breath. "We're just — married. Just like that."

"Just like that," he said.

"You don't seem like you feel anything about it."

"I don't need to feel anything about it. I need it to work."

I almost laughed, the sound catching somewhere ugly in my throat. "Lucky you."

He glanced down at me then, and for half a second I thought he might actually answer that. He didn't. The doors opened onto the hallway, and beyond it, I could already hear a second wall of noise waiting — bigger than the one we'd just walked through, hungrier.

"What happens now?" I asked.

"Now," he said, "we go outside, and you let them see exactly what I want them to see."

I didn't like how easily he said *I want*, as though my face were simply another asset he'd acquired today along with the company's stock price. But I had agreed to this. I had shaken his hand — no, I corrected myself, I had *taken* his hand — and there was no version of the next several months where I got to be surprised by what that meant.

"And what is it you want them to see?" I asked.

He stopped, just before the hallway opened onto the plaza where I could already hear cameras clicking in anticipation, and looked at me properly for the first time since the altar.

"A husband who adores his wife," he said. "Convincingly enough that no one asks any further questions."

"And if I can't do convincing?"

"You will."

It wasn't cruelty in his voice. It was certainty, which was somehow worse, because certainty didn't leave room for me to prove him wrong.

He held out his arm. Not his hand this time — his arm, the formal gesture of a man escorting his wife into public view. I looked at it the same way I'd looked at his hand in the dressing room, like accepting it meant agreeing to something bigger than the gesture itself.

Then I slid my hand through it, because the alternative was standing frozen in a hallway while cameras waited on the other side of a door, and I refused to give anyone that image either.

"Ava," he said, before we stepped through.

It was the first time he'd said my name. I hadn't realized until that moment that he'd known it at all.

"What."

"Whatever happens out there — don't fight me in front of them. Fight me all you want once the doors close."

"Is that a promise?"

Something almost like the ghost of amusement crossed his face, gone as fast as it came. "Consider it one."

Then the doors opened, and the world I used to belong to disappeared behind us for good.