“Didn’t I tell you the first time we met, I’d never hurt you?”
I freeze.
“Didn’t I?” He moves closer, his warmth searing a path throughout my system. “You flinched. Thought I was going to hurt you. I may be a lot of things, Catriona, but I would never raise a hand to you.” A huffed breath ruffles my hair. “At least not in ways you wouldn’t like.”
“It pains me to say this, I hope you know that. But I shouldn’t have hit you. It was?—”
“If I wanted your apologies, I’d ask for them. But if you really need my forgiveness, then go to this meeting with me, sign all the papers, and don’t put up a fuss. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise, what?”
“Otherwise, you’ll have to come up with another way to make it up to me.”
Fat chance that’s going to happen. I study his face, trying to read him, but his expression is carefully neutral. At my silence, O’Connor takes my hand, and we move down a brightlylit hallway to a conference room in the middle of the floor surrounded by glass. It reminds me of a giant fishbowl. A man with carefully cropped white hair and a groomed beard gets to his feet as Anne leads us into the room. He’s rotund, with glasses and rosy-pink cheeks.
“Mr. Bennett, Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor are here.”
“O’Connor,” Mr. Bennett says in a booming voice. “Lovely to see you. Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mrs. O’Connor. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. We normally don’t like to delay this business so long, but our schedules finally synced up.”
“No problem, David. You have everything we talked about?” O’Connor pulls out a chair for me, and I sit, my eyebrows still raised in astonishment. He takes the seat next to me, across from Mr. Bennett, and places a proprietary hand on my thigh underneath the table. I try to discreetly shrug away from his touch, but he resists, clamping down on the muscle as he focuses on whatever paperwork Mr. Bennett slides in front of him.
“Standard contracts we’ve discussed. Life insurance. Wills. Living will. Investment and brokerage accounts. Trusts, etcetera.”
“Excellent.”
“Your lawyer has already gone over everything and sent his approval, Mrs. O’Connor. If it all looks agreeable to you, we’ll just need your signatures on the lines we’ve flagged.”
“Right,” I whisper.
Mr. Bennett clears his throat. “We’ll just need your signature next to Mr. O’Connor’s, please. It’s marked with the tabs.” He pushes a sheaf of papers across the glossy surface of the table to me.
“O-of course,” I stammer. “Shouldn’t we discuss this some more? It seems—” My gaze flicks around the room, but Anne has made a quiet retreat, and Mr. Bennett is arranging the paperwork for me to sign. No one is listening to me.
I put pen to paper.
O’Connor’s hand tightens. Slips higher. I try to push it off, to no avail.
As I go through the paperwork, Mr. Bennett places account summaries and investment plans in front of me, as well as others I don’t fully comprehend. But the number of zeros on the statement lines makes things pretty fucking transparent. I nearly swallow my tongue. Aiden’s hand tightens again. I sign my name. This process repeats several times until we get through the impressive stack.
In the end, I’ve been added as a beneficiary to his retirement and investment accounts, and I've been made a secondary account holder on all his (and there are many) banking accounts. Even if we get divorced, I’ll be a rich woman. Vastly, vastly rich. Even without my mother’s inheritance.
“That’ll be it then,” Mr. Bennett says when all is done. My hands are numb, and there’s a ringing in my ears that won’t quite go away. This… this entangles us in a way more permanent than marriage. Money is sticky. Messy. It can ruin you. I could take everything from him, yet he’s… giving it to me. It doesn’t make sense.
As I’m puzzling through it, O’Connor finally lets go of my thigh to push to his feet and clasp Mr. Bennett’s hand in a firm handshake. They exchange slaps on the back and small talk while I have a mini panic attack about what I’ve just done.
“Of course, take all the time you need,” Mr. Bennett is saying when I tune back in. He nods at me with a congenial smile before pushing away from the table and leaving.
I flick my gaze around the fishbowl conference room, but no one seems to pay any attention to us even though there are open office doors and cubicles less than ten feet away. My heart beats a frantic rhythm in my throat, chest, and ears.
“I shouldn’t let you do this,” I say on a shuddering breath.
“Let me?” he scoffs. “Are you going to stop me?”
“Yes. This is insane. You’re insane. We’ve only been married for a few days.”
“Almost two weeks.”
I roll my eyes, ignoring the way my cheeks heat. Has he been counting? “Fine, two weeks, but that doesn’t help your case. You don’t know me well enough to trust me with this. I can’t in good conscience agree to taking half of your money. O’Connor, you’re a billionaire. That’s alotof fucking money.”
