Chapter Three #2
She felt anger rising up inside of her, such an uncommon feeling, and one that she hated.
She didn’t do anger; she didn’t do out-of-control.
She was someone who kept her emotions in check at all times.
This panic that was taking over her like a ravenous wolf was entirely unwelcome, and the howling anger that accompanied it was even worse.
She tried to calm herself down. Tried to draw a deep breath.
This was still Alex, and she still knew him.
This was not something that she had expected from him, and indeed nothing that she had ever expected to deal with ever, but she was going to listen to him.
Listen to his rational explanation. He was her boss, so she really did need to listen.
And, whatever he said, she needed to try and find a peaceful outcome to it.
If she blew everything up she would lose her job; she wouldn’t be able to stay in Greece because she wouldn’t be able to afford it.
Everybody knew that she was Alex’s assistant, and now they thought she was his fiancée.
So whether she liked it or not, she was in a pickle.
She needed to calm down, be a little bit mindful and figure out what the right thing to do was rather than responding in an emotional state.
Because she wasn’t either of her parents, and she didn’t fly off the handle at a moment’s provocation.
“No. I confess I didn’t think to speak to you about it. It is such a logical step.”
“It’s a logical step,” she repeated.
“Yes. Everyone at the board meeting absolutely loved you. You humanize me. That’s what I hired you for.”
“You hired me to be your assistant, and teach you how to have...casual conversations.”
“Yes. To humanize me. I realized that it would be much more effective to use you in that capacity in a public sphere.”
“But you... You realize that this is my life. You are hijacking my life. This isn’t nine-to-five, this isn’t office work, you’re talking about pretending to be engaged to me.”
“Oh no, I’m not.”
“Then I’m even more confused.”
“I’m talking about marrying you.”
She clenched her teeth together and had to breathe very deeply because if she didn’t she was going to fall over. Or leap across the room and strangle him with his tie. “You must be joking.”
He looked down, and then looked at her, like he was staring straight into her soul.
“What do you want, Verity? I have spent two years having lunch with you, and I know who you like in this office, what foods you like to eat, your favorite recipes to cook at home. I know where you like to shop around Athens, and I know that you’re from Oregon.
I know what movies you like, and TV shows.
We have talked about every casual, small thing under the sun.
What I don’t know is what you want to do with your life. ”
She didn’t know why, but the question and the direct nature of his gaze made her teeth chatter. Made it hard for her to breathe, hard for her to think.
“I... I want to be independent. And to have enough money to support myself, but also enough time to enjoy where I live. I want to date. And make new friends, and go out and have fun. I want what most people in their twenties want.”
“That’s shallow,” he said, waving a hand dismissively. “That’s what everyone wants.”
“I want to have enough that I never have to go back to where I came from,” she said, feeling raw and exposed by those words. Feeling goaded into saying them.
“And that is what I want. And it is also what I offer you. If you do this, if you marry me, for at least six months, and it has the desired effect, after which we will discuss the length and terms even more explicitly, then you and I will both achieve our goals. I will send you on your way with a very healthy hazard pay package.”
She took one breath. Then another. And what he said began to sink in.
“What do you mean you’ll send me on my way?”
“If this wedding and marriage are supposed to look authentic, then it would be very unusual for us to continue working together afterward.”
Her head was spinning. He was proposing that they engage in a fake marriage, and that it would be the end of her relationship with him.
Of course she had never imagined that this job would last forever.
It had always been a weird job. From the moment that she had first agreed to it, it had seemed too good to be true, and definitely not something that would continue.
In fact, she was somewhat surprised that she had been doing it for two years.
That he had continued to want to have lunch with her every weekday during that time.
But she was being torn in half by this. This thing he was proposing that she was still having trouble wrapping her head around. He wanted to marry her. And then he wanted her to go away.
But he was also offering her...
Independence.
“I don’t want to get married,” she said.
He hadn’t asked, and she supposed it didn’t really matter for the purposes of what he was talking about.
“I thought you liked Stavros?” he asked.
“I do. But I want to go out with him. And maybe...” The back of her throat felt prickly. “You know, I want the same things that you do when you go out with someone. I don’t want forever.”
Her cheeks heated. “No. I don’t romanticize marriage.”
How could she? Her house had been a war zone.
She supposed she could be grateful that neither of her parents had abused each other or their children with their fists.
But she had learned that psychological warfare could be just as damaging in many ways.
It had taken her so long to rebuild any sense of value and herself.
The enormous weight she’d carried every day trying to keep the peace had left her exhausted. She’d put all her own emotions on the back burner to appease them. She had learned that she didn’t matter, that everyone else mattered more.
In some ways, she felt like she had truly emerged from her cocoon after college.
Those four years she had still felt like it might all be taken away from her at any moment.
Like maybe she wasn’t good enough or smart enough.
Wouldn’t be able to finish, wouldn’t be able to amount to anything.
She had also vowed to herself that she would rather be on the streets than ever go back home.
But because of that anxiety that had dogged her during her college years, she hadn’t really had fun. She had been hoping to have some fun. And now Alex was asking her to pretend to be his wife.
Except...
She pressed her fingertips to her temples. “Wait a minute. There’s a plot hole here. You think that I can marry you, and then we’ll get divorced, and it won’t just undo everything that we did with this relationship?”
She still wasn’t entirely convinced that them getting married would do what he thought. Though, she could see what he was thinking. It would make him look like a man with an interior life, a man who loved someone, and had someone who loved him in return.
She didn’t like the way that thought made her feel. It opened up a strange, yawning ache inside of her that she wished would go away.
And yet, even as she shoved that thought to the side, the feeling remained.
“I don’t think that it will undo everything. Particularly not if we make it clear it ended amicably.”
“It will just look like I signed an NDA.”
“You will be doing just that.”
“I already did,” she pointed out.
“Yes. So you did. But I will have you sign another one. Because I will make it legally clear that I need you to keep my confidence personally as well as professionally.”
Her heart was beating quickly again, and she tried to calm herself. There was no way she was actually considering this.
“You knew that I was going to ask Stavros out,” she said.
“Yes. And now I know he isn’t the love of your life. Nor did you intend him to be.”
Drat.
“But I like him. I wanted to...”
“You will not sleep with other men during the duration of our marriage.”
You will not sleep with other men.
Those words scraped along her skin, down her spine; they froze her. Did he mean that she would...?
She stared at him.
Alex was a decade older than her, a billionaire. Hard, intense, everything that she had spent her life actively avoiding.
And here she was, embroiled with him in a way that she would never have been able to explain to younger Verity, who would not believe that she had gotten herself into this situation.
“Yes?” he asked.
Her brain was still frozen. She shook her head, and tried to catch her breath. “You don’t mean...?”
“It will be a marriage in name only. We will make the terms of it very clear. You will perform the planning of the wedding. It will be available for public consumption. We will telegraph every part of this to a hungry public, and they will fall in love with you.”
He looked at her, his dark eyes burning with conviction. She felt very much like she suddenly understood how it was to be Snow White, offered a poisoned apple. This was a poisoned apple, and she knew it. She still felt drawn to it. Still felt like she wanted it.
Like she might die if she didn’t have it.
“You are special, Verity Carmichael. And the whole world will see it. What you did in that board meeting you will do writ large.”
A small, angry part of her, wounded and curled up at the center of her chest, was so tempted.
Her full name was out there in the media.
Her family would see it. They would know that she had left home, and she had made something of herself.
That the only reason she had ever seemed small or insignificant was because they had clipped her wings, and once she had some freedom, to heal, to find herself, she had found a way to fly.
If she married Alex, she would be married to one of the most famous, one of the wealthiest men in the world.
She could help fix his company. It frightened her, how much that mattered.
This idea that she could be responsible for fixing this.
That she could be that important. She was the peacekeeper of her house, and she knew that it had been a toxic thing for her to have to do, but part of her still felt desperation where that was concerned.
Still felt a deep, unending need to prove her worth. To make something better.
To show everyone that she wasn’t the one who was broken.
And yes, it was going to cost her that date with Stavros, but Alex was right.
She didn’t hold out hope for love, not in the way most people thought of it.
Yes, it would be nice. But the idea of living in some suburban fantasy, husband, wife, children, it made her feel almost nauseous.
She had felt trapped in her childhood home, and she would be damned if she was ever trapped again.
But this was different. This was different.
“I need to know your terms. Specifically.”
He nodded. “I have had a document drawn up.”
He reached into his jacket pocket, and took out a folded stack of papers.
He thrust the sheaf into her hand, and she only looked at them.
“I doubt it would be too much work for you to tell me what’s in them.
Considering that you’re demanding I marry you, for real, put my life on hold and have this as part of my story forever, till the end of time. ”
He shrugged a shoulder. “It will be a marriage in name only. Of course I would never coerce you into intimacy. This is a business deal. Like I said, we will stay married for six months. With the option to extend the marriage by six more months if there is something critical occurring once the six months lapse. You will receive an allowance that is three times your current pay through the duration of the marriage. And then you will receive a lump sum upon the ending of the marriage. Which we will say ended amicably, in a united front. We will have a story that we both tell with matching details. Forever. No one is to ever know that the marriage wasn’t real.
Not your family, and if you do decide to marry at a later date, you may not tell him either. ”
Well, she wouldn’t decide to get married later.
And she didn’t have close friends right now that she would be lying to, and she wasn’t going to invite her parents to the wedding.
Later, when she did make the friends that she hoped to make, when she was traveling the world, which this would allow her to do, she might be sorry that she wouldn’t be able to tell them the truth.
But wasn’t that a small price to pay?
“I... How much is the lump sum?”
He tapped the paper.
She opened it slowly, and her heart leaped when she saw the amount written there.
It was unfathomable. Millions of dollars.
Enough to make her independently wealthy for the rest of her life.
She could do...whatever she wanted. The only limit would be what she could imagine.
For a woman who had always struggled with the concept of her own self-worth, that was a strange door to open up.
Money was a great reason to not follow your dreams.
But if she had all this money, she could. Which meant that she needed to figure out exactly what those dreams were.
But she would have the time to do that. She would have the time to make herself into a new person. One who wasn’t so affected by her parents.
It almost felt like anything was possible. Anything would be possible.
She also knew that she could put up with anything. For a little while. Six months, maybe a year, with somebody that she already knew she liked spending time with. He wasn’t asking for anything sexual. He wasn’t asking her to give much of anything.
“What am I supposed to do when we are...married?”
“You will support me the way that you do now.”
So she would still have her job. Which actually made her feel relieved. Because at least something would be normal.
“Then...” The truth was, she couldn’t justify saying no to this. It would be criminally insane to turn him down. “Then I accept. Yes, Alex. I will marry you.”