Chapter 16
Miley
My stupid brain would not stop replaying the kiss.
Three days. It had been three days and every time I closed my eyes I was back on that sidewalk outside the gallery with Christopher Vale’s hand on the back of my neck and his mouth on mine.
I replayed it while I cooked. I replayed it while I showered.
I replayed it while I was on the phone with the contractor about Sazón’s plumbing, and the poor man had to say “Ms. Torres?” three times before I snapped back to reality and asked him to repeat whatever he’d said about the pipes.
It was the kiss. It was just a kiss—for the cameras, for damage control, for Trisha’s checklist. It meant nothing.
Except I'd kissed him back. And kissing him back wasn't on any checklist.
That night, I heard his footsteps come through the front door.
I lay in bed for an hour having a full debate with myself about whether I should bring him the extra dessert from one of my experiments or just go to sleep like a normal person who wasn’t obsessed with feeding a man who’d told her she wasn’t his real wife.
Normal-person Miley lost. Chef Miley won. She always won.
I padded down the hallway in bare feet with a bowl of chocolate mousse I’d made that afternoon. There was extra. It seemed wasteful to let it sit in the fridge overnight when there was a man twenty feet away who was probably surviving on bourbon.
I knocked on his bedroom door.
Nothing.
“Christopher?”
Nothing. I waited. Then I tried the handle because I was Miley Torres and I had never in my life been capable of leaving well enough alone, and the door opened because he’d probably forgotten to lock it.
The room was dark. The bed was made. Pillows perfect. Duvet smooth. The same untouched look I’d seen that first morning weeks ago when I came looking for him, found an empty room, and a man who appeared from nowhere carrying a pillow.
I heard something faint—breathing, coming from the closet.
The closet door was slightly open, just a crack. Something in my gut pulled me forward.
I opened the door slowly, quietly.
Christopher Vale was on the floor.
Curled on his side. Back against the wall.
Knees drawn up. A pillow under his head, a throw blanket pulled to his chin.
In the faint light from the bedroom, he looked smaller than he’d ever looked.
Smaller than a man who was six-foot-four had any right to look.
Like he’d folded himself into the smallest version of himself he could manage and pressed himself into the corner where the walls met.
I stood in the doorway holding a bowl of chocolate mousse and my brain did the math.
The morning I’d knocked and he appeared from nowhere. The bed that was always made. He wasn’t coming from the bathroom that morning. He was coming from here.
My eyes burned. My throat burned. Everything burned.
I backed out of the room, closing the door without a sound.
I didn’t ask about the closet.
I wanted to. Every morning when he walked past me with his coffee and his composure and that face that gave away nothing, the question sat right behind my teeth.
Why the closet? How long? Does it help? Are you okay?
But I’d been the teenager in Aunt Eliza’s storage room, sharing a mattress with Vicky, staring at the ceiling and wondering if anyone would notice if I wasn’t there.
And the one thing I knew about wounds like that was that you couldn’t fix them for someone else.
You could only be close enough that they knew you were there when they were ready.
So I didn’t ask.
The public appearances kept going. A lunch where Christopher pulled my chair out.
“I have arms, you know,” I said.
“Noted. Should I also stop opening doors?”
“Only if you wanna stop showing off in front of the paps.”
The photographer got us mid-laugh and the photo trended for two days.
A bookstore where I disappeared into the cookbook section for fifteen minutes and forgot he existed.
When I finally resurfaced, he was standing three shelves away, arms crossed, watching me with an unreadable expression I caught in a mirror between the stacks.
A fan snapped a candid that went viral with the caption the way he looks at her.
I saw it that night and stared at it for way too long before I finally shut my phone off. Went to bed, dreamed about blue eyes, and woke up feeling like I'd been emotionally mugged.
I was starting to notice things about him that had nothing to do with the contract.
The way he held a coffee cup with both hands like he was trying to absorb warmth through the ceramic.
The way his voice dropped lower when he was tired.
The way he stood slightly behind me in public, never in front, like he was used to letting other people have the spotlight while he watched from the edges.
I told myself to stop. I reminded myself of the kiwi. The manipulation. I held onto the anger like a guardrail because without it I was standing at the edge of something I could not afford to fall into.
Then Elspeth called.
“Aunt Eliza fell. Broke her hip. She’s in the hospital.” A pause—then the sweetness curdled, predictable as always. “It would be nice if you and your sister could stop being heartless for five minutes.”
I hung up. Sat on the bed. Pressed my palms into my thighs and breathed.
I hadn’t spoken to Eliza since the trust fund fight, hadn’t been in that house since the night I packed a bag and left.
But Eliza raised me. Badly, coldly, with conditions attached to every scrap of care.
But she raised me. And I wasn’t a person who could ignore a broken hip, no matter whose hip it was.
I was putting on my jacket when Christopher appeared in the hallway.
“Where are you going?”
“Hospital. My aunt fell.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“I don’t need you to.”
He picked up his keys anyway. “I’ll drive you.”
Aunt Eliza was in bed, pale and diminished, which softened something in me for about three seconds until she opened her mouth.
“Oh, you came. I’m surprised you could make time.”
Vicky and I had a name for that. The Eliza absorption. You let her words hit you and pass through without lodging. I’d gotten good at it.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“How do you think I’m feeling? I broke my hip.” She looked past me to Christopher. “And who is this?”
“Christopher Vale. My husband.”
“I know who he is. I have a television.” She studied Christopher the way she studied everything of value, assessing its worth. “You married well. I’ll give you that.”
Elspeth was there. So was Owen, who looked me up and down the second I walked in.
“You look good, Miley. Marriage agrees with you,” he said, with a smile I wanted to remove with a spatula.
Christopher was behind me. Owen extended his hand, and Christopher took it. Something happened in the grip I couldn’t fully see—something that made Owen’s smile falter and his hand come back a little faster than it went out.
Elspeth turned to Christopher with wide eyes and a slight lean, deploying the calculated charm she used on every man she’d ever wanted something from.
“It’s so wonderful to finally meet Miley’s husband. I hope you’re taking good care of her.”
“I try my best,” Christopher said. “Although she’s more than capable of taking care of herself.”
Elspeth’s smile went stiff.
While Christopher talked to Eliza, Owen leaned toward me, dropping his voice.
“I’m happy for you, Miley. You deserve someone good.” His hand found my arm. “But this doesn’t mean you get to turn your back on your family entirely.”
I stepped back. Before I could say a word, Christopher was there. He probably didn’t hear what Owen said but he saw the touch. His hand went to the small of my back and he looked at Owen with an expression that was perfectly pleasant and completely lethal.
“We should get going. Miley’s had a long day.”
In the car, I was quiet. Eliza's voice was still in my ears.
I turned to the window, but instead of the city I caught my own reflection—small, tired, wearing the careful face I used to wear in her house, braced for whatever came next.
Ten years old again, standing in Eliza's kitchen, being told that gratitude was the least she expected.
Christopher didn’t drive home. He took streets I didn’t recognize and parked outside a small ice cream shop with a hand-painted sign and colorful chairs on the sidewalk.
“What are we doing here?” I asked, confused.
“You need ice cream.”
“I’m fine. I don't need it.”
“Who says you can't have ice cream if you're fine?”
“Well, that's true.”
“Come. Their ice cream is good.”
I got out of the car because he was right and because mint chocolate was on the chalkboard menu and I was weak.
He got plain vanilla, which was both predictable and weirdly endearing. We sat in the mismatched chairs and ate in silence. The evening air was warm and nobody recognized us, nobody took photos, and for the first time since the contract started, I wasn’t performing. Neither was he.
He took a bite of his vanilla. Then, casually, with his eyes still on the street, he asked, “Who was that?”
“Who?”
“The man at the hospital. The one who kept trying to put his hand on you.”
His face was neutral. His eyes were not. There was heat behind them, the same territorial heat from the hospital with Dominic, except this time he was doing a worse job at hiding it.
“My cousin’s husband,” I said, looking down. “Owen. He chased after me before Elspeth. Never seemed to understand that I didn’t want him then and I definitely don’t want him now.”
Christopher took another bite of vanilla and said, very quietly, “Prick.”
I laughed. A real one, surprised out of me.
I raised a brow. “Are you jealous?”
“I don’t get jealous.” He cleaned a drip off his thumb. “Jealousy implies I feel threatened. I don’t feel threatened by a man who wears loafers without socks.”
“You noticed his shoes?”
“I notice everything. It’s a professional habit.”
“Mm-hmm.” I took a lick of my mint chocolate. “A professional habit. That’s what we’re calling it.”
He ate his ice cream and said nothing, which was an answer all by itself. From the corner of my eye I caught the edge of something on his face that he was working very hard to flatten. The fact that he was failing made something warm and reckless bloom in my chest.
We sat there while the sky went orange and the streetlights came on.
The shop owner, a round man with a mustache and a flour-dusted apron, came outside to wipe down tables and said something in Spanish about what a beautiful couple we were.
I translated for Christopher. I wasn't fluent but I could understand a bit.
“Tell him I agree,” he said.
I did not translate that. My face was already warm enough.
“Why did you say that?” I asked, without looking at him. “About me being capable.”
“Because it’s true.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I wanted to.”
I asked the question that had been sitting in my throat since we left the hospital. “Why did you come with me? You could have stayed home. Let me handle my own family.”
He looked at me. “Because you’re my wife.”
It landed differently this time. Not like a contract term. Not like a line from a script. Like something that had come out before his brain could catch it and edit it into something safer.
“Contract wife,” I said, gently.
He shrugged. “Still counts.”
We looked at each other. The ice cream shop’s colored lights reflected in his eyes, the evening was warm, his face was close, and for one held breath I wasn’t thinking about contracts or kiwis or closet floors.
I was just looking at him and he was just looking at me, and the world got very small and very still.
Then he looked away, back to his vanilla. The moment broke, because neither of us was brave enough to hold on.
I turned back to my mint chocolate. I felt my heart thump, just a little, like a knot I'd been holding for weeks giving a single thread of slack.
And then, because it made room for other things—things I'd been carrying alone and hadn't meant to put down in front of anyone—the words came out before I could stop them.
“It’s my sister.”
He looked at me, waiting.
“Her custody battle.” I stared at my ice cream cone because looking at him while saying this felt like too much.
“Her ex-husband’s family has money. They’re using the restaurant’s destruction as evidence of financial instability.
Vicky’s income was tied to Sazón because she invested in it.
When the restaurant went down, so did her documented earnings.
And now Greg’s team is arguing that Eloise would be better off with him.
” I swallowed. “That’s part of the reason I was so angry. ”
“I’m sorry.” He said it quietly.
I looked at him. “I’m not telling you so you could apologize. I just…”
Wanted to speak about it to someone. Wanted someone to listen.
I caught myself before I said those parts out loud. Heard what I was saying. Who I was saying it to. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. It’s not your problem. You don’t have to listen to my family’s mess.”
“I’m your contract husband.” He said it evenly, looking at me with those blue eyes that gave nothing away and everything at the same time. “The least I can do is listen to my contract wife’s problems.”
I smiled. I couldn’t help it.
“Pretty sure listening to my family drama isn’t in our contract.”
“Neither is eating ice cream together on a sidewalk in Coral Gables.” He held my gaze. “So go ahead, Miley. You can tell me everything.”
My breath caught. His gaze held mine steadily.
Christopher Vale.
He was flawed. He was capable of great cruelty and unexpected kindness in the same breath.
And I was falling for him so hard that the impact was going to leave a mark.
I didn’t trust it. But I felt it.
And for the first time since this whole mess started, I didn’t tell myself it was fake.