Chapter 7
Christopher
She texted me at eleven-forty that night.
I was in my home office, jacket off, bourbon untouched on the desk beside a stack of quarterly reports I still hadn’t read, when the notification came through on the private line.
I picked up the phone.
The message was long. Earnest. Slightly rambling, like how she talked in person, full of feelings she couldn’t quite contain. She thanked me for the meeting and the public statement Trisha had just released, clarifying that I hadn’t been hurt by her restaurant.
The message ended with: I’m still thinking about the job offer. I’ll let you know soon.
I set the phone down.
She was thanking me. The woman whose life I’d wrecked was writing me a thank-you note at midnight. She was cleaning up my mess and calling it generosity.
I thought about the resort, kissing her hand. The scent of her. Coconut and citrus.
I was planning to put up an act. A charming man controls the room. I’d been performing my entire life, reading people, adjusting, giving them the version they wanted to see.
But with her, it had come too easy, too natural. The words, the gestures. It flowed without effort, without calculation, and that was the part that kept me sitting at this desk at midnight staring at a text message from a woman I’d known for less than a month.
Morning. Trisha was in the doorway of my office before I’d finished my first coffee, arms crossed, wearing a blazer over what appeared to be her husband’s t-shirt, glasses crooked.
“I sent you the pre-recording of the interview,” Trisha said. “It airs next week. The pre-cut looks good. Claire Devereaux tried to tear you apart and your little chef held the line without breaking a sweat.” She tilted her head. “She called you kind. On camera. To a reporter who wanted your head.”
“I watched the pre-recording already.”
Trisha studied me. I could feel her reading the room the way she always did.
“It’s been handled, but I kinda feel bad for her. This is a good person, Christopher. A real, actual, good person, and keeping the fact that you ate the kiwi on purpose is still killing my conscience—”
“What would you think if I asked her to marry me?”
Trisha kept talking. “—You owe her a lot and not even the compensation you gave her is—”
She stopped.
Her mouth was still open. Her hand was still raised mid-gesture. She looked like someone had pressed pause on a person.
“What?” she whispered.
“You heard me.”
“Say it again.”
“I said what would you think if I asked her to marry me.”
The scream that came out of Trisha Park could have shattered the windows.
“WHAT?! MARRY? Did you just say MARRY? Christopher Vale, have you lost your entire mind? Did the kiwi do something to your brain? Do I need to call a neurologist?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“I WILL NOT KEEP MY VOICE DOWN!”
I looked at the phone on my desk. Face-down. Her message still on the screen underneath.
She looked like a woman who could do anything for the right person.
And she didn’t seem greedy. I’d offered more than rebuilding her restaurant, a full financial package, new equipment, expansion capital, and she’d refused most of it.
She’d asked for a handwritten quote. A quote.
From an interview I barely remembered giving.
“That poor girl,” Trisha said, quieter now but still pacing. “You want to drag her into the Vale circus? Into a fake marriage for a company you don’t even want? You want to put a ring on her finger and parade her in front of a board that will chew her up before the appetizer course?”
When Trisha finally ran out of words, I looked up. Then I frowned.
“Why hasn’t she responded about the job yet?”
Trisha stared at me. “Did you hear a single word I just said?”
“Every word. You’re very loud. It’s impossible not to. Now, the job. Did she respond to you?”
“No. She didn’t. And you can worry about that later because you have a board meeting in forty minutes and you’re sitting here in a t-shirt thinking about a fake wedding.”
She was right about the meeting. She was wrong about me worrying about it later.
But I got dressed. Put on the suit. Did the face.
The Vale Industries boardroom was exactly as I remembered it from the one time my father had let me visit as a teenager. Long, polished, smelling of old money and new leather. The chair at the head of the table was the same one. I was sure of it. Same dark wood. Same high back.
I stared at it while the room filled.
My father’s voice surfaced from somewhere I thought I’d locked.
Sitting in this room at sixteen, brought along because Eleanor insisted, and my father turning to a colleague and saying, loudly enough for me to hear, “Let him watch. It’s the closest he’ll get to the business. The boy would rather play pretend.”
Play pretend. That’s what he called acting. Playing. Like the career I’d built, the awards, the global recognition, was a child’s game.
“Mr. Vale?”
I blinked. The room was full. Twelve men and women, looking at me with varying degrees of skepticism and curiosity.
Esmeralda sat at the far end. My stepmother.
Dressed in black, pearls, perfect posture.
She looked at me the way she’d always looked at me, like I was a stain on a white tablecloth that she couldn’t remove without making a scene.
I sat in my father’s chair.
The old man must be turning in his grave. The thought gave me a satisfaction I didn’t bother hiding.
Paul Hargrove spoke first. Silver hair, silver tongue, a man who wielded politeness like a blade. He raised the question of my public image with the gentle precision of a surgeon explaining why amputation was necessary.
“The company needs stability,” he said. “The tabloids have run, what, six stories in the past month? Various women. Nightclub appearances. The hospital incident.” He folded his hands on the table.
“With respect, Mr. Vale, the board needs to know that the man leading this company projects responsibility. Not… entertainment.”
He said “entertainment” the way you’d say “infection.”
Esmeralda said nothing. She didn’t need to. Paul was doing her work for her, and the slight upturn at the corner of her mouth told me she knew it.
I was about to respond when Eleanor’s voice cut through.
“Christopher is engaged.”
The room went still.
I turned my head slowly and looked at my grandmother. She sat beside me in her navy cardigan and pearl earrings, hands folded, face serene, as if she’d just announced the weather forecast rather than a complete fabrication.
“He’s settling down,” she continued. “The tabloid history is exactly that. History. I suggest the board focus on quarterly projections rather than gossip columns.”
Paul raised an eyebrow. Esmeralda’s composure fractured for half a second before she smoothed it over.
The room recalibrated. The meeting continued.
I sat through the rest of it with my hands flat on the table and my face giving away nothing, which was impressive considering my grandmother had just committed me to a fake engagement without consulting me first.
The elevator. Just the two of us. I waited until the doors closed.
“When exactly did I get engaged?”
Eleanor adjusted her pearl earring. “About twenty minutes ago.”
“You lied to a room full of people who will expect to meet this fiancée.”
“Then you’d better find one.”
She said it the way she said everything. Simply. Factually. Like the solution was obvious and I was being slow.
The doors opened. She walked out. I stood in the elevator and watched her go and thought about the fact that my seventy-year-old grandmother had just committed me to finding a wife in a building where the only woman I’d spoken to voluntarily in the past month was a chef who knocked over salt shakers and called me kind on national television.
I responded to Miley’s text that evening. Kept it brief. Told her I appreciated her note, asked if she’d decided about the job offer, then suggested we meet to discuss it in person. I sent her the address of a lounge I knew in Coral Gables.
The lounge was upscale. I arrived early and ordered bourbon. Then I ordered another.
I wasn’t drunk. I didn’t get drunk. But I was sitting in a bar contemplating asking a woman I’d met three times to marry me, and that required a certain amount of alcohol to process.
Marriage. Me. Christopher Vale, who had walked in on the only woman he’d ever loved naked in bed with his brother.
Christopher Vale, who hadn’t had a relationship that lasted longer than three months since he was twenty-three.
Christopher Vale, who trusted exactly two people on the planet and had built his entire existence around never needing anyone.
I was going to ask a stranger to be my wife.
Trisha was right. I’d lost my mind.
My phone buzzed. Trisha—I ignored it. It buzzed again. And again.
A hand touched my shoulder. Fingernails painted red, perfume aggressive and entirely uninvited.
“Drinking alone?”
Adrianna. Of course.
She slid onto the stool beside me, wearing something low-cut and tight. Her smile was the one she deployed when she wanted something, which was always, because Adrianna had never entered a room without wanting something from it.
“Buy me a drink?” she asked.
“No.”
“Come on. We just wrapped a film together. One drink.”
“I said no.”
She leaned closer. Her voice dropped. “We could go back to your place. Just us. No cameras, no crew. Just… you and me.”
I took a sip of bourbon without looking at her. “Adrianna, I endure your presence on set because the contract requires it. I am not extending that arrangement to my personal life. Not tonight. Not any night. Not if you were the last woman in Miami and the alternative was celibacy until death.”
She went still beside me, the warmth gone out of her posture.
“You’re an asshole,” she said.
“I’ve been told.”
She picked up the glass of water on the table and threw it in my face.