Chapter 1
PAIGE
Making a deal with the devil was surprisingly efficient.
After I sent the email, his lawyers and mine hammered out the details, the contract, and the prenup with dazzling speed. Both of us had an incentive to move fast.
I don’t know why I thought it would feel better, all of it.
Hubris, maybe. Definitely a good dose of desperation, the kind where you’re backed into a corner and the only hand to reach for belongs to the man who made sure you had no other way out.
Raphael Montclair.
As devils go, he looks the part. At least in the images I’ve seen, where he’s dark-haired and olive-skinned, the picture of casual elegance and wealth.
But there’s a glint in his eye, evident even in pictures, like he’s thinking about how to crush your company under his boot and take all the profits.
And today I’m meeting him for the first time.
At the altar.
“Are you sure about this?” my friend Amy asks. She’s sitting on a chair in the small room we’ve been given in the courthouse, her legs crossed, auburn hair curled around her shoulders. She’s in a lavender dress.
A bridesmaid dress.
We joked about it, last night, holed up in a hotel room and preparing for today. I’m wearing a white dress that stops just at my knees. The bride wears white.
“I’m sure,” I say. It’s a lie, but Amy nods like she hears conviction in my words. I’m grateful for the lie.
“It’s just… Paige, you haven’t even met him. It doesn’t have to happen so fast.”
“It does. We don’t have time to lose.”
“You can give yourself a week. You can negotiate a dinner, a lunch—anything. What if he’s horrible in person?”
“He probably is. But it doesn’t matter.” I reach for my earrings, the pearl-studded gold hoops my mom gave me on my high school graduation.
My hands don’t shake as I put them on. With every day that passes, my uncle drives our family’s company further toward bankruptcy. He told me that was his plan.
I’d rather ruin it than let him have it. If we drive the stock down, Montclair’s shares will be worthless. He’ll sell them.
But my uncle is the only reason Raphael even could back us into a corner. The reason we’ve had to sell shares over the years, shares that Rafe Montclair could buy through anonymous trusts until he eventually controlled us from the inside.
He’s a fox, but Ben’s the one who let him into the hen house.
“If he’s horrible,” Amy says, “I’ll come with you. I’ll spend every single day beside you while you have to be married to him. I’ll be a human shield.”
I look down at my hands, braced against the side table. It’s been a long time since we were close enough for that sort of thing. She is my best friend, but she lives in Boston with her husband and her one-and-a-half-year old, and she has her own life.
We’re not college roommates anymore. Like so many people in my life, her path diverged from mine, and I was left standing alone.
“Thank you,” I tell her. “I bet your husband would love having to fly with us tomorrow.”
“A vacation to Europe? He probably would.” Amy gets up from her seat and comes up behind me. I look at us in the mirror. “You’re beautiful.”
I take a deep breath. My blonde hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, and I’m wearing a deep red lipstick. Brown eyeliner brings out my chocolate-colored eyes.
I’m a sacrificial lamb, but at least I look good going to slaughter.
Raphael Montclair is everything I despise in this business.
There’s a clear bottom line to him, and it’s all about profits—nothing else.
History doesn’t matter. Craftsmanship doesn’t matter.
He and his family are like a giant dragon, swallowing up all these precious historical companies without a care in the world for who they hurt or for who they demolish along the way.
Small ateliers have to close because of him and his family.
Decades of experience, passed down in small craftsmanship families, now left destitute.
That’s what he does, and that’s what he leaves in his wake.
Worse, the brands they acquire are turned into soulless pieces in the wheels of a giant conglomerate, pumping out devalued products.
These pieces sell at incredible prices based on nothing but the goodwill the brand built through its past achievements.
A keychain made of plastic with a logo on it? The overhead on that is low, and the profit margin is gigantic. But what you’re really selling is a dream, the idea that someone can own a small piece of a brand with storied history. And here he is, doing the very same thing.
Well, he won’t do it to our brand. To our company.
I want nothing to do with Raphael Montclair, but that decision was taken out of my hands. Like it or not, our business’s finances can’t hold up to the twenty-first century. The craftsmanship and the quality need a boost of income, and, like it or not, the Montclairs can provide that.
But I’m not about to let our family business go that easily. The only way to ensure the shares are spread equally is to make the ultimate sacrifice:
To marry him.
“Think we’ve kept him waiting long enough?” I ask.
Amy smiles at me through the mirror. “He’s definitely worried that you’ve gotten cold feet.”
“Good.” I turn toward the door. “If he thinks I’m going to make this marriage easy on him, he has no idea what’s coming for him.”
“You’re scary,” Amy says, following me in the narrow courthouse corridor. “I’m going to keep my resting bitch face on for the whole ceremony, just so you know. Doesn’t mean I’m not supporting you fiercely from within.”
“You’re scary too, you know. When you want to be.”
“I’m quietly scary. You’re actually scary.”
We stop in front of the doors. I take another deep breath and reach for the door handle. I was the one to ask for five minutes to freshen up before the ceremony, then took over fifteen instead.
I hope he’s standing in there annoyed out of his polished, controlled, strategic mind. I may be giving him access to my family’s company, but he’s going to have to pay dearly for that privilege.
I push open the door.
The room we’ve been given is pretty small. Large windows are covered with shades, and there’s gray carpeting. Inside are only a handful of people.
My lawyer is on the left side, leaning against a wooden table. She hasn’t sat down, like she’s ready for battle, ready to ride at dawn. I love her, even if I don’t like the price of her retainer.
Amy is the only friend I’ve told about doing this. It feels like no one would understand why I’d do this.
But no one loves Mather & Wilde the way I do. No one understands the pain of watching my uncle make all the wrong decisions after my parents’ death. Of watching our employees despair and the profits dwindle.
The other side of the room is busier. Three people instead of one. There’s a sharply dressed woman who screams lawyer, too, and beside her is a brown-haired man around my age with a scar through his right eyebrow.
But it’s the person between them that my eyes land on.
I recognize him right away from the pictures online. He’s taller than I thought, nearly a head above me, and I’m not short.
He’s listening to something his lawyer says and I only catch his profile.
His black hair is thick and pushed back over a tall forehead. The lower half of his face is covered in a five-o’clock shadow, and he wears a black suit despite the summer heat.
He nods and then looks around the room with narrowed eyes. Like he’s looking for someone.
Me.
I step into the room and walk across the carpeted floor. His eyes land on me and narrow in recognition. Then they drop down over my body in a clear inspection.
It’s so brazen that my teeth grind together.
This is the same man who has a reputation for ruthless excellence. Who demands nothing but the best from his employees, who inherited a luxury kingdom and has expanded it into an empire.
“Paige,” he says. His voice is deep.
“Raphael.” I have to tip my head up to meet his gaze, and I hate him for that, too.
“You’re late,” he says.
I lift my eyebrows. “Oh, I’m sorry. Are you in a rush?”
He turns toward the courthouse clerk like I haven’t spoken. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Very romantic,” I comment.
He slides narrowed eyes to mine in a thoroughly unamused look. It makes my lips twitch. Oh, this man is going to give me so much fun.
There’s no hint of a foreign accent when he speaks. And why would there be? I was foolish to expect it. He’s half Swiss, raised mostly in Europe, but his mother is American. At least according to the information I’ve found on him online, reading article after article obsessively.
The officiant looks between us from behind square glasses. She’s a woman in her late forties, perhaps early fifties.
She’s no doubt been clued in that this isn’t a love match.
The ceremony is short. There are no vows. No music. Only the tense silence of people in the room who don’t like each other and the sound of my own breathing, my heartbeat audible in my ears.
I’m stuck with him. For the company’s sake, we have a strict divorce clause. Whoever initiates the divorce… loses their shares to the other.
It would be complete capitulation.
I wouldn’t mind it, if he divorced me. I’d lose Maison Valmont’s giant coffers, but the company would be entirely mine. No man to dictate my moves. That’s my plan B. Annoy him into divorcing me, if need be.
Rafe signs the document first with quick, practiced movements. An R and then a snarled M. He must sign things often, using his last name like a sword.
I sign my name next to his.
My hand shakes a little when I put it to paper. Paige Wilde. I write it slower than usual and make sure every letter is perfect. At the end of my name I draw a tiny heart.
I’ve never done that before. But I know he’s watching, and I’m betting on all of this bothering him. My lateness, my slowness. When I straighten up, my signature looks pristine next to his scrawled handwriting.
The clerk looks from the paper to us, standing side by side in front of her. “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” She looks at Rafe. “You may now kiss the bride.”
“No, you may not,” I say at the same time Rafe mutters “No, thanks.”
Behind us, there’s a muffled chuckle. Rafe reaches for the wedding certificate and looks it over with hard eyes.
“It’s done,” he says.
No, I think. We’ve only just begun.