The Devil's Bargain

Chapter Two: Moving Day

The penthouse took up the top three floors of a building on Central Park West, and the first thing Maren did upon arriving with her two suitcases and a cardboard box of kitchen things she wasn't sure she'd ever be allowed to use was start doing the math on how many of her mother's hospital bills the elevator alone could have paid off.

"You can stop looking at everything like you're going to be charged for touching it," Alexander said, from somewhere behind her. He'd beaten her there, of course he had, he probably had a car that didn't hit red lights, and was standing in the doorway of what she assumed was his study, sleeves rolled up, tie gone, looking so aggressively at ease in his own absurd wealth that it was almost offensive.

"Forgive me for not having a reference point," Maren said. "My last apartment had a stove that caught fire if you used more than two burners at once."

"Noted. I'll have the insurance policy on this place updated to cover acts of Maren."

"That's not " She caught the twitch at the corner of his mouth and narrowed her eyes. "You're making jokes now. That's new."

"I contain multitudes." He nodded toward the hallway to her left. "Your room's the third door down. I had someone stock it, but if anything's wrong, there's a house line to the staff kitchen. Do not, under any circumstances, try to find the coffee machine yourself. It has more settings than a 747 cockpit and it hates strangers."

"You're telling me your coffee machine is sentient and hostile."

"I'm telling you it broke my assistant's finger. Well." He considered. "Bruised. Legal made me say bruised."

Despite herself, Maren laughed, a short, surprised bark of a sound that she immediately wanted to take back, because laughing at Alexander Voss's jokes felt like a door she wasn't supposed to open yet, not on day one, not when the ink on the contract was still basically wet.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. He seemed to notice everything, in that unnervingly complete way, like he was building a file on her in real time and cross-referencing it against some internal database of everyone who'd ever disappointed him.

"There are rules," he said, turning serious again, and something in Maren's chest deflated a little at the shift. "Not many. But real ones."

"Go on."

"No press without my PR team present. Ever. If a photographer gets a shot of you buying groceries alone, that's fine. If a reporter gets you alone for even thirty seconds, it's not, they will twist anything you say into a headline, and I will not be able to protect you from it once it's printed."

"I can handle myself with a reporter."

"You've never met the kind of reporter that circles this family." His voice had gone flat, careful, the way people got when they were standing on top of something they didn't want to look down at. "Second rule. My grandmother, Eleanor, arrives Thursday for dinner. She will ask you invasive questions designed to catch you lying. Answer them honestly wherever you can, because she has a nose for performance that has never once been wrong, and if she decides you're a fraud in the first ten minutes, this whole arrangement collapses before it starts."

"And the third rule?"

He was quiet for a second too long. "There isn't a third rule. I was being dramatic for effect."

"Liar," Maren said, and watched something in his jaw tighten — not anger, she realized. Closer to being caught.

"The third rule," he said finally, "is that whatever happens over the next six months, whatever this starts to feel like, it isn't real. I need you to remember that, because I'm not going to be able to remind you every time. I'm not built for the other thing. Ask anyone who's tried."

"Noted," Maren said, mimicking his clipped tone from earlier, and had the satisfaction of watching surprise flit across his face before he caught it and smoothed it away.

She spent the rest of the afternoon unpacking in a bedroom bigger than her mother's entire apartment, running her fingers over sheets that probably cost more than her monthly rent, trying not to think too hard about a man who handed out rules about not falling for him like he was handing out fire safety instructions — thorough, rehearsed, and just a little too specific to be theoretical.

Dinner with Eleanor Voss, when it came on Thursday, was nothing like Maren had braced for.

She'd expected an interrogation. Icy silences. A woman in pearls looking down her nose at the temp-agency girl playing dress-up in a Voss fiancée's clothes. Instead, Eleanor arrived in a wheelchair pushed by a nurse named Carmen, wearing a caftan the color of a sunset and a diamond the size of a knuckle, and the first thing she said upon seeing Maren was:

"Well, thank God. He usually goes for the ones who look embalmed."

"Grandmother," Alexander said, in the tone of a man who had had this exact fight many times and lost every one.

"I'm ninety-one, Alexander, I've earned the right to say embalmed." Eleanor extended a hand toward Maren, ring-heavy and surprisingly strong. "Sit next to me, dear. Not next to him. I want to look at you without his big head blocking the view."

Maren sat. Across the table, Alexander gave her a look that was somewhere between apology and warning, and she found herself fighting back a smile.

"Tell me how you met," Eleanor said, the second the soup arrived, no preamble, eyes sharp as a hawk's despite the caftan and the wheelchair and the nurse hovering discreetly by the door.

This was it. The test. Maren had rehearsed the cover story in the car — a mutual friend, a charity gala, love at first sight over canapés — but looking into Eleanor Voss's eyes, pale and assessing and entirely too knowing, the rehearsed version dried up in her throat.

"He interviewed me for a job," Maren said instead, "and about forty minutes in, he told me he needed a wife instead."

Silence dropped over the table like a curtain. Alexander's fork froze halfway to his mouth. Somewhere behind her, Maren heard Carmen the nurse make a small, strangled sound that might have been a laugh she was trying to swallow.

Eleanor's face didn't move for three full seconds. Then she threw her head back and laughed — a real laugh, delighted and wicked, the kind that made her look forty years younger and explained, instantly, exactly where Alexander had gotten the storm in his eyes.

"Oh, I like her," Eleanor said, to no one in particular, wiping at her eyes. "Alexander, darling, I like her enormously. Where did you find a woman who doesn't lie to my face?"

"I found her in a job interview, apparently," Alexander said, recovering, though the look he shot Maren across the table was pure disbelief — and underneath it, something that looked dangerously like admiration.

"She's honest," Eleanor said, turning back to Maren with a fresh, evaluating look, softer now but no less sharp, "which means either you actually like each other, or she's the best con artist I've met since your grandfather, God rest him, sold me a fake Rothko in 1962 and I married him anyway." She patted Maren's hand. "Either way, dear, I approve. Now. Tell me what he's like when he thinks no one's watching. I want the real gossip."

By the time dessert arrived, Maren had told Eleanor three true stories about the coffee machine, the ridiculous safety rules, and the strange, unexpected kindness in the way Alexander had told his own driver to take a longer route so she could see the park lit up at night — and she caught Alexander watching her the entire time with an expression she couldn't name and didn't dare examine too closely.

It wasn't supposed to feel this easy. That was the problem.

That was going to be the whole problem, she suspected, for the next six months.