Married to a Scandal

~CHAPTER II~

Luca's POV

By the time Luca Kensington got the text, the story had already been written, photographed, and gone viral. He just hadn't read it yet.

PAVEL: check page six. now.

He never checked page six. There was a rhythm to it: someone snapped a photo of him leaving a place he shouldn’t have been, with someone he shouldn’t have been with. By morning, the story wrote itself, regardless of whether he read it. Reading it just revealed how creative they had gotten with the caption.

"You're not even going to look?" Delphine, of the Rousseau shipping fortune, reclined on his hotel suite's velvet chaise, sounding almost offended for him.

"Why would I spoil the surprise?" He poured a generous drink of something pricey into a glass. "Plus, I already know what it says. Reckless heir, latest scandal, my father's patience running out. They've been using the same headlines about me since I was nineteen. You'd think they’d get tired of it by now."

"Don't you get tired of it?"

He smiled at her over the rim of the glass. "Darling. I invented tired of it."

What he didn’t say: she had unintentionally revealed the details of her family's shipping merger with a company his father had been trying to undermine for a year. What he didn’t say: this evening had cost him only a hotel suite and forty minutes of pretending to be interested, yet it provided him with information far more valuable than that.

Mostly, what he didn't say was anything true.

His phone buzzed again. Not Pavel this time.

FATHER: Come to my office at eight a.m. Do not be late this time.

Luca looked at the clock. It was already past two.

"I have to leave," he told Delphine, sounding a bit regretful. He wanted her to feel valued, not ignored. It was a small act of kindness that didn't cost him anything.

*****

His father's office carried the same cologne scent it had for thirty years. Robert Kensington didn’t stand when Luca entered and didn’t look up from the folder before him.

"Do you know what this is?" he asked.

"I'm going to guess it's not a birthday card."

"It’s the fourth incident this quarter, Luca. A car, a senator's daughter, a nightclub closure because you treated the roof like a dance floor, and now this. The board is questioning me, and I don't have answers. Kensington Group's stock dipped again this morning. It’s small, but that’s four small dips this quarter, and I’m tired of pretending it’s a coincidence."

Luca understood just how accurate his father’s assumptions were, but he decided to stay silent. For him, pretending to be uninterested was the only defence he had against his father, who had misread Luca's quietness as ignorance for over a decade without ever questioning it.

"So," Robert said. "Here is what's going to happen."

He slid a folder across the desk. Luca didn't touch it.

"You're getting married."

For one full second, Luca thought he had misheard his father.

"I'm sorry?"

"Kang Selene is Chairman Kang's daughter. She runs the city's leading crisis management firm, which could help you with your recent scandals. The marriage solves two problems: it shows the board that you’re settling down, and it gives the press something new to talk about. Plus, her father gets funding for his son's businesses, which seems to matter more to him than what his daughter thinks about it."

"Illegitimate daughter," Luca said, mostly to see if his father would flinch. He didn't.

"Does it matter?"

"It might matter to her."

“It’s not my problem, and it won’t be yours either starting next month.” Robert clasped his hands together. “You’re going to marry her. You’ll act, in public, like a responsible man who can handle more than just hotel bills. Otherwise, I’ll stop supporting you completely, and your brother will get the share that was meant for you.”

Stepbrother, Luca corrected silently. He'd stopped saying it out loud years ago. It never landed the way he wanted it to.

He should have felt something sharper than this. Anger, maybe. Humiliation, arranged like cattle into a marriage designed to fix his father's problem. Instead, what he felt, what he always felt, underneath the practised boredom, was the quiet, familiar click of a plan reorganising itself around new information.

A marriage to a woman with access to the rooms he had spent a decade trying to enter. A woman whose professional reputation relied on managing the kinds of crises he had been quietly creating for years.

This wasn't a cage. His father had just handed him a door.

"Fine," Luca said.

Robert blinked. He had expected resistance, a fight, at minimum, or the sulking silence Luca usually offered instead of an argument. "Fine?"

"I'll marry her, but on one condition."

"You're not in a position to negotiate."

"Humour me anyway." Luca leaned back, unhurried, and let the smile settle into place. The easy, careless smile that had convinced half of Manhattan he was exactly as harmless as he looked. "Give me a real stake. Not for show. Something with actual weight behind it. Call it a wedding gift."

Robert studied him for a long moment, clearly searching for the trick and finding nothing but a bored, expensive smile staring back.

"And why would I do that?"

"Because it'll make the board believe you actually trust me with something," Luca said. "And because it costs you nothing to look generous in front of people you've already decided to underestimate."

His father exhaled through his nose. "Fine. A minor position. We'll discuss the specifics."

"Wonderful." Luca stood, buttoning his jacket, already thinking three moves past this room. "It should be something small, of course. I wouldn't want the responsibility to interfere with my reputation."

He spoke in a carefree manner. In fact, he approached everything with that same lightness. It was the only way people allowed him to get close enough to inflict harm.