Forced Into His Arms

CHAPTER 4 — First Night Under the Same Roof

The penthouse had a rule, unspoken, that revealed itself to Valentina on the first night: before eight in the morning and after nine in the evening, the common spaces were neutral territory.

She didn't know it was a rule until she walked into the kitchen at eleven-thirty PM, unable to sleep, wearing pajama pants and an oversized sweater that had a small bleach stain on the cuff she hadn't noticed until she was already in the elevator, and found Alejandro Montoya standing at the counter in grey sweatpants and a plain white t-shirt, drinking water and reading something on his phone, looking thoroughly and unexpectedly human.

They both stopped.

The kitchen was very large. It could have comfortably held six people. It held the two of them and about three meters of charged silence.

"I was going to make tea," Valentina said.

"The kettle is on the right," he said, and went back to his phone.

She made tea. She was very aware of every sound she made — the click of the kettle, the small clink of the mug, the soft rustle of the tea tin. He did not look up. She did not look at him, mostly.

When the kettle boiled, she said, without turning around: "Do you want some?"

A pause. "No."

She poured her tea. She stood at the counter and drank it because she had not yet entirely figured out the geography of the common areas, and the kitchen felt safer than finding the wrong sofa.

"You can sit," he said, without looking up. "You don't have to stand."

"I know I can sit. I'm choosing to stand."

"Why?"

"Because," she said, "I'm not ready to be comfortable here yet, and I'd rather stand and admit it than sit and pretend."

He looked up then. A look she was starting to recognize — quick, assessing, slightly reluctant, as if he had not expected her to say the honest thing and was recalibrating around it.

"Fair enough," he said.

She drank her tea standing at the counter. He read whatever was on his phone. It was not comfortable, exactly, but it was not hostile. It was two people occupying the same space and not making it worse, which was, she decided, probably the best she could hope for on Day One.

When she finished, she rinsed her mug. "Goodnight," she said.

"Goodnight," he said, still looking at his phone.

She was almost at the door when he spoke again.

"The chef," he said, "comes at seven. You said you cook. He would prefer to have the kitchen before seven or after nine."

She turned. "I'll remember that."

"And there's a gym on the forty-eighth floor. Building residents have access."

"Thank you."

"And —" He stopped. Something moved across his face, very briefly — not quite discomfort, but something adjacent to it. "The housekeeper. Señora Dolores. She tends to be... maternal. If it bothers you—"

"It doesn't," Valentina said, before he could finish. "She gave me a tamale when I arrived. She's already my favorite person in this building."

He almost — almost — made a sound that might have been a laugh. It died before it became one.

"Goodnight," she said again, and went back to her wing.

She lay in the dark in the enormous bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about the fact that in the kitchen, in grey sweatpants, Alejandro Montoya Vega was significantly more difficult to dislike than she had planned.

Don't, she told herself firmly. Twelve months. Contractual. Don't.

She closed her eyes.

In the kitchen, Alejandro set down his phone and looked at the place where Valentina had been standing.

She had a bleach stain on her sleeve and she had stood at his kitchen counter and drunk her tea with the particular self-possession of a person who had nothing to prove, and he could not decide if that was admirable or simply very, very inconvenient.

He picked up his phone. He put it down again.

He went to bed.

Neither of them slept particularly well.

The wedding was on a Thursday.

It was the quietest large event Valentina had ever attended, which was a contradiction she was still processing as she stood in the registrar's office in a cream dress that Luciana had taken her to find two days prior ("You need something that says I meant to be here without saying I planned this for years"), with Camila on one side and Luciana on the other, and Paredes and Alejandro's oldest friend Rafael as the witnesses, and a civil registrar named Señor Bautista who had the professional serenity of a man who had married thousands of people and stopped investing emotionally sometime around 2015.

Alejandro was in a dark suit. Of course he was. He probably slept in a dark suit.

She stood beside him at the registrar's desk and he was very close — closer than he had been in the boardroom — and she noticed for the first time that he smelled faintly of something clean and resinous, like rain and cedar, and she thought: That is not helpful information. Please forget that immediately.

Señor Bautista asked them the questions in the flat rhythm of a man reading from a form, which in fact he was.

When he asked Alejandro if he took Valentina Reyes as his legal wife, Alejandro said sí in his flat, certain voice, as if it were a business confirmation.

When he asked Valentina if she took Alejandro Montoya Vega as her legal husband, she said sí in a voice that was steadier than she expected.

Señor Bautista asked them to sign.

They signed.

He told them to exchange rings — simple bands, gold, Luciana had handled this — and Alejandro's hands were very still as he placed the ring on her finger, and she looked at his hands because looking at his face felt, for that specific moment, like looking at the sun.

Then it was done. They were married. By law, by contract, by the will of two old men and the machinery of inheritance.

Luciana clapped. Camila made a sound suspiciously like a sob and then loudly denied it. Paredes looked like a man who had completed a task that had weighed on him for months and was not entirely sure he felt better.

Alejandro turned to Valentina. His expression was unreadable.

She extended her hand.

He looked at it. He shook it. Brief, firm. The same as in the boardroom.

"Congratulations," she said.

"Congratulations," he said.

Camila made the sound again.

The dinner that night, at Don Rodrigo's insistence, was at El Pabellón, which was exactly the kind of restaurant Valentina had expected: hushed, beautiful, a menu in a language that was technically Spanish but felt like a different dialect entirely, waiters who materialized and dematerialized with the smoothness of expensive machinery.

Don Rodrigo was — and this was the part Valentina had not expected — wonderful.

He was seventy-something, compact, with a white mustache and the eyes of a person who had spent decades paying close attention to people and finding them interesting rather than exhausting. He took both her hands when they arrived, held them, and looked at her for a long moment.

"You look," he said, "like your grandmother."

Valentina's breath caught.

"I knew Rosa," he said simply. "And Ernesto. I was at your grandfather's wedding, and at the dinner the night before your father was born. I have known your family longer than you have been alive, and I want you to know—" His eyes were warm, old, slightly fierce. "You were not a footnote in this plan, Valentina. You were the point of it."

She didn't trust herself to speak.

He patted her hands and released them, and the moment passed, and dinner began, and Valentina sat across from her new husband who refilled her water glass without being asked and didn't speak to her directly for the first forty-five minutes, and she decided that on balance, this was going to be the strangest and most difficult year of her life.

Under the table, without planning to, she touched the gold ring on her finger.

And across the table, she did not notice Alejandro watching her do it.

Several hours north, in a hotel bar in Monterrey, Isabella Fuentes was pouring her third drink of the evening when her phone buzzed with a news alert:

MONTOYA HEIR WEDS IN PRIVATE CEREMONY — ALEJANDRO MONTOYA VEGA CONFIRMS MARRIAGE

She read it three times.

Then she set down her drink, very carefully, and she smiled — the kind of smile that has nothing warm in it.

"Well," she said softly, to no one. "That changes things."

She picked up her phone and dialed.

"It's me," she said when someone answered. "Clear my calendar for next week. I'm going to Mexico City."