The Devil's Bargain

The first thing Maren Cole noticed about Alexander Voss was that he didn't look up when she entered his office. The second thing she noticed was that his office took up the entire fortieth floor of the Voss International tower, glass walls on three sides, Manhattan spread out below like something he'd bought and was still deciding whether to keep. "Sit," he said, still reading whatever was on the tablet in front of him. Maren sat. She smoothed her blazer — the good one, the one she'd bought for her sister's wedding three years ago and had dry-cleaned twice since for exactly this kind of occasion — and folded her hands in her lap like a woman who had not, forty minutes ago, been crying in her car in the parking garage because her landlord had called about the rent again. "Ms. Cole." He finally looked up. And God help her, the photos hadn't done him justice. Alexander Voss was thirty-four years old and looked like he'd been carved by someone with a grudge against the rest of the male population — dark hair, a jaw that could cut glass, and eyes the color of a storm that hadn't decided yet whether it was going to pass over or flatten the town. "You have a business degree from a state school, four years of administrative experience, and a reference letter from a boutique hotel in Poughkeepsie that went bankrupt eight months after you left." "It went bankrupt because the owner's nephew embezzled two million dollars, not because of anything I did," Maren said, before she could stop herself. Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. A down payment on one, maybe. "I know. I read the SEC filing." "Then why bring it up?" "Because I wanted to see if you'd correct me or apologize." He set the tablet down. "Most people apologize." "I'm not most people." "No," he said, and there was something in the way he said it — slow, considering, like he was turning her over in his hands — that made the back of her neck go warm. "I don't think you are." He stood, and it was only then that she understood how badly the desk between them had been doing its job of making him seem like a normal-sized human being. He was tall in the particular way that made a room recalibrate itself around him, and when he came around to lean against the front edge of the desk, close enough that she had to tip her head back to keep looking at him, she had the sudden, dizzying sense of having wandered into water much deeper than she'd realized. "Here's my problem, Ms. Cole." He crossed his arms. The motion did something unfair to the fabric of his shirt across his shoulders. "In six weeks, my grandmother, who controls forty percent of the voting shares in this company and who has never once in her life minded her own business, is going to die." Maren blinked. "I'm — sorry?" "Don't be. She's ninety-one and she's been threatening to die dramatically for a decade to get what she wants, and it's worked every single time." He said it without a flicker of grief, which told Maren more about the Voss family than any tabloid ever could. "Her last wish, allegedly, is to see me married before she goes. If I'm not, the shares she controls default to my cousin Preston, who will run this company into the ground within eighteen months and take nine thousand employees with him." "That's — a lot to put on a job interview." "This isn't a job interview." Alexander tilted his head. "This is a job offer. I need a wife. Temporary. Contractual. You'll be compensated at a rate that will let you pay off whatever debt is currently keeping you up at night — and don't tell me there isn't one, Ms. Cole, you had four different collections agencies call your cell phone during the twenty minutes you sat in my lobby, and my assistant has excellent hearing." Maren felt her face go hot with something between fury and humiliation. "You had someone listen to my calls?" "I had someone notice you kept declining them and looking like you wanted to disappear into the carpet. That's not surveillance, that's basic observation. Try to keep up." He said it without unkindness, which somehow made it worse. "Six months. You move into my penthouse, you play the doting fiancée at a handful of events, you charm my grandmother, who by the way will see through any performance that isn't at least eighty percent true, and at the end of it, we have an amicable, well-publicized split and you walk away with two million dollars and a signed reference letter from me personally." Two million dollars. Maren's hands, folded so primly in her lap, wanted to shake. Two million dollars was her mother's medical bills paid off. It was the roof that needed replacing before winter. It was, for the first time in eleven years, actually breathing. "Why me?" she asked, because some stubborn, self-preserving part of her brain refused to let the number make the decision for her. "You could have anyone. Actresses. Models. Women who actually want to marry a billionaire." "Because those women want to marry a billionaire," Alexander said, and for the first time, something raw slid under the polish of his voice. "You walked in here forty minutes late because your car broke down on the FDR, and when my assistant offered to reschedule, you said no because you'd already lost half a day's pay for a temp job to be here. You don't want anything from me except the number on that contract. That's the only kind of honest I can work with." Maren stared at him. Outside, the city glittered on, indifferent to the deal being struck forty stories above it. "You've done this before. Hired someone." "No." Something shifted behind his eyes — quick, guarded, gone before she could name it. "I've never let anyone close enough to need to." The words hung there, more confession than he'd probably meant to give her, and Maren understood, with the particular clarity of a woman standing at the edge of a very tall building, that this was the moment to say no. To stand up, thank him for his time, and go back to her life of temp agencies and unanswered calls and the particular ache of watching her mother's hospital bills pile up on the kitchen counter like snow she couldn't shovel fast enough. "I'll need it in writing," she heard herself say instead. "Every clause. And I want approval over the wedding dress." For the first time since she'd walked in, Alexander Voss smiled — a real one, quick and startled out of him, like he hadn't expected to still be capable of it. "Done." "And I'm not sleeping with you." "I didn't ask you to." "You were going to." "I was considering it," he corrected, and the storm in his eyes had definitely decided which way it was going to break now, "somewhere around the part where you told me my grandmother's letter of reference wasn't a legitimate reason to question your résumé. But I can be patient, Ms. Cole. I own four airlines. Waiting is the only thing I'm actually good at." Maren picked up the pen he slid across the desk before her nerve could fail her, and signed her name at the bottom of a contract she hadn't read, next to a man she'd known for less than an hour, for a marriage that was only supposed to be pretend. She would think about that signature a lot, in the weeks to come. About the exact moment a very smart woman had looked a very obvious disaster directly in its storm-gray eyes and decided to marry it anyway. Outside, the sun went down over Manhattan like it was in on the joke.