“I thinkwemake us credible,” he says. “But the ring helps.” He doesn’t come closer. He simply holds it between us like a contract I can’t unread. “We’ll need to be convincing. Hand at your back. You looking at me like you chose this. Small touches that say we’re not counting minutes until we’re alone, we’re counting memories we’ll make when we get there. That’s how you win rooms like the trust. That’s how you shut down gossip on a roadshow floor.”
“You want me toactlike I love you.”
He stares at me with simmering gray fire for a moment before he shrugs. “I want you to act like you don’t hate me.” Dry. “Start there.”
I stare at the diamond until my vision sparkles. “And if I say no?”
“Then you pack your grandfather tonight,” he says evenly. “My ownership is clean; your tenancy is not. I will fund his care elsewhere, but he won’t stay here.” A beat. “Or you say yes, and I guarantee everything—staff, medical, whatever he needs—until he dies inhisbed, inhishome, as he wants.”
I feel the trap close and still I look for a loose brick. But there isn’t one. I can’t risk my grandfather’s health. Not when he’s been through so much.
The first time Theodore Kane’s heart stuttered into sirens and white hallways is the year my father, Harrison, turned our last name into headline fodder. Irrational boardroom rants, gambling markers stacked like kindling, public affairs splashed across society pages, my mother smiling through it until she couldn’t. Until the shame and stress caused her to miscarry my brother and my father’s infidelities and grief finished what the tabloids started.
And as if one tragedy wasn’t bad enough, I watched my grandfather age a decade in a year with two more heart attacksthat came like aftershocks when his other son, my Uncle Ellis was tragically killed in a car accident.
Loss, arriving like macabre dominoes, collapsed the spaces where laughter used to live; the house grew larger and colder, and now Grandpa moves through it like a man mapping the ruins of his own empire.
He always regretted handing the reins to Harrison, but by the time the truth was undeniable, the hooks were too deep with board votes already captured, debts pledged against futures, the island leveraged like a pawn. Theodore couldn’t wrest back control until Harrison ran it all into the ground.
He doesn’t speak to my father now, and in between rehab and bouncing around Europe living on the fumes of our surname and the tatters of our trust, I haven’t seen or spoken to my father in years.
I push away acrid memory and focus on the man in front of me. Watching me with piercing gray eyes. “You keep sayingwe’llbe convincing, but that’s a two-sided performance, Vasso. You’re not exactly cuddly.”
“Then I’ll adjust.” He steps in, not touching, close enough that I feel the heat rolling off him. “I’ll put my hand at your back and mean it. I’ll look at you like I never stopped. I’ll kiss you in public when it serves us and stop when you breathe that way that says you’re done.” His voice roughens. “I know the choreography.”
The banister digs into my palm. “This is revenge dressed as romance.”
“It’s strategy dressed as mercy.”
“For who?”
“For both of us.”
I hate that the ring looks right when he slides it onto my finger. The platinum is cool, then warm, the hidden halocatching the foyer’s anemic light and throwing it back in sparks. It feels like a shackle. It looks like a cruel promise.
I lift my hand and the emerald facets cut me into a version of myself I don’t recognize. “How long?” I ask, just to be sure I heard him right the first time. Hoping I didn’t.
“A year,” he confirms to my heart’s horror. “Less if the optics hold.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then we hold harder.”
My laugh is a crack. “You’re a bastard.”
His gaze drops to my mouth and stays. “And you’ll be the brave wife who withstands it all with charm and poise.”
For one wild second I want to throw the ring at his head and kiss him in the same motion. Instead, I draw a breath that tastes like dust and old money and new mistakes.
“Fine,” I say. “You get your wife. I get my grandfather in his home for as long as he needs it. But hear me, Vasso—if you lie to me, if there’sanythingabout this agreement and I find out? The performance ends. No smiles. No hand on my back. You want a loving couple?” I lean in until our breaths tangle. “You’ll only get it with honesty.”
A muscle jumps in his cheek but I catch the glint of victory in his eyes. “Understood.”
“Good.” I drop my hand. The diamond throws another cruel starburst against the ceiling. “Then let’s go tell a dying town we’re in love.”
“Let’s start with your grandfather,” Vasso says, almost gentle. But there’s more than a hint of relish in his eyes.
And I know it’s because the day has finally come.
