Chapter 3 The Proposal
THE PROPOSAL
NAOMI
Luca used seventeen of his thirty seconds to ask me to marry him.
The remaining thirteen belonged to my disbelief.
Around us, the ballroom came apart one expensive piece at a time. A forklift beeped near the south wall. Crew members rolled the temporary mirrored floor into padded tubes. Someone tested the fire curtain, sending a sheet of red fabric down behind Luca like the world's most accurate warning.
He stood in the wreckage of last night's fantasy and said, with perfect composure, "I need a legal wife before March sixth. I believe a marriage between us could protect both parties, provided the terms are equal and the decision is entirely yours."
I looked at him.
He looked back.
"That was your proposal?"
"It was the premise."
"Do I get music during the supporting argument?"
"You have made your views on string quartets clear."
"I made my views on falling glass clear. The quartet was excellent."
His mouth moved at one corner.
The response made me angrier than blank arrogance would have. I knew how to manage arrogance. Luca's ability to listen, adjust, and remain attractive while saying something appalling was a more advanced operational threat.
I folded my arms. "You have twenty-eight seconds left. Emergency rates compound."
"The family voting trust requires me to marry before my thirty-sixth birthday and maintain a principal household with my spouse through a September review. If I fail, the controlling proxy passes to Bastien."
"Your cousin who wants to put Beaumont logos on luxury assisted-living towers?"
"Among less defensible ideas."
"And you want me to prevent that by becoming Mrs. Quarterly Earnings."
"I would not ask you to change your name."
"How progressive."
"Naomi."
He said my name without the polished amusement he used to make most resistance feel flirtatious. It came out low and direct.
I hated that my body noticed the difference.
I had spent years building an immunity to Luca Beaumont.
Exposure therapy should have worked. I had seen him at six in the morning after hotel openings, at midnight when customs held couture pieces, and at private dinners where women watched him with the concentration of people waiting for a door to unlock.
I had watched him calm investors, rescue designers, and end conversations before the other person understood they had lost.
I had also stood close enough to feel his mouth almost touch mine.
Fourteen months earlier, after the Beaumont Riviera resort opening, a storm had trapped three hundred guests beneath an outdoor pavilion designed by an architect who believed weather was a lack of commitment.
I moved the entire dinner into a citrus greenhouse in forty-two minutes.
Luca found me afterward in a service corridor, barefoot because one heel had broken, laughing from exhaustion.
He had looked at me as if no contract in the world had prepared him for the sight.
His hand touched the wall beside my head. Mine settled against the front of his shirt. For three dangerous seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then his phone rang.
By breakfast, his attorney had sent terms.
The memory returned now with humiliating clarity. Not the near-kiss. The document. The section labeled Discretionary Gifts. The phrase no expectation of emotional continuity.
I had never wanted to throw a laptop through a window more elegantly.
For years before that offer, I had treated Luca's companions as another category on the event schedule.
Arrival name. Dietary note. Security clearance.
Departure car. I told myself every woman understood the arrangement because each appeared confident, beautifully dressed, and unsurprised when the calendar changed.
Then one of them, a cellist named Mara Venn, cried in my production office after a charity concert because her access card had stopped working two days before the term she believed they had discussed.
Luca's attorney later corrected the date and sent an apology with jewelry.
Mara returned the bracelet. The incident had not been abuse.
It had been something quieter and easier to excuse: a woman discovering that the man beside her trusted the document more than the conversation.
When Verity Gray contacted me months later, I did not provide gossip. I confirmed dates, repeated structures, and the fact that assistants could change a woman's place in Luca's life without Luca speaking to her himself. I had believed the pattern mattered more than my professional loyalty.
I still believed that.
Standing in the wreckage of his gala, I also understood that accepting a marriage proposal without telling him my role would create its own elegant omission.
The thought made my anger feel less clean.
"You already offered me an arrangement," I said. "I declined the first one."
"This would not be that."
"It would involve a contract, public appearances, a defined term, and you. I am struggling to locate the distinction."
"You would have equal drafting authority, independent counsel, your own residence if you prefer, and an unconditional right to end the marriage."
"You want to prove a stable household while I live elsewhere?"
"I said if you prefer. I have not designed the structure."
"That must be frightening for you."
"More than I expected."
The answer was too honest to dismiss quickly.
I uncrossed my arms and pointed toward a stack of folded linens. "Walk."
He fell into step beside me.
I did not take him somewhere private. Privacy was Luca's native environment. It made everything he said feel more intimate and everything I wanted feel more possible. I kept us in the center of the load-out, where electricians shouted measurements and my crew could see me clearly.
"Start with the risk," I said.
"Your public reputation would become attached to mine.
The blacklist would resurface. Your clients could question whether Beaumont business influenced your company.
Reporters would examine your finances, relationships, and history.
The trust would require evidence of a shared household, though not sexual or private access. "
"Keep going."
"Your time would no longer be entirely yours. There would be public obligations, family events, and security considerations. Any eventual divorce could become a public story."
"And what do you get?"
"Control of the voting trust through the September review. Protection of the company from Bastien's expansion plan."
"A wife who knows where the emergency exits are."
"That as well."
I stopped beside the black-glass flowers.
One of the damaged peonies lay on a worktable. A fracture ran through the center, nearly invisible until light found it.
"What do I get?" I asked.
Luca's attention moved to my face.
"That would be for you to define."
"No. You came here with a proposal. Tell me what you decided a year of my life was worth."
"I did not decide."
"You always decide."
"Not for you."
I laughed once, without humor. "You expect me to believe you arrived without a number?"
"I arrived with a trust deadline, a complete explanation of the public risk, and instructions to counsel that no payment could be structured in a way that made refusal expensive. I have not assigned a value to your agreement."
"Yet."
"At all."
"You want me to define the benefit while you define the deadline," I said. "That is not equal drafting. That is asking me to decorate a structure you already need."
"Then reject the structure."
"I did."
"Yes."
His lack of resistance remained infuriating.
I moved around the worktable and began separating damaged petals from intact ones. It gave my hands a job that did not involve pointing at him.
"A legal marriage would not stay legal," I said.
"It would become the first line of every profile written about me.
Pierce Events would stop being the company I built and become the company Mrs. Beaumont happened to own before she married well.
Clients who already assume a woman in luxury events is ornamental would finally have the photograph they wanted. "
"That risk is real."
"My employees would be interviewed. Former clients would sell stories. Every invoice from Beaumont would be treated as evidence that you funded my success. Every room I designed for your family would be reclassified as courtship."
"I would disclose the commercial history and your independent ownership."
"You could publish my tax returns in the lobby. People would still prefer the simpler story."
"Then the agreement would need remedies for professional damage."
I looked up. "Money is not a remedy for being made smaller."
"No."
"You keep saying the right thing after building the wrong machine."
His jaw shifted once.
"That is fair."
"Stop making it difficult to dislike you efficiently."
"I was not aware efficiency was the objective."
"It is always the objective."
A crew member passed us carrying one of the black stone bases that had held the mannequins.
Luca stepped aside without making the man navigate around him.
The gesture was ordinary. That made it worse.
I wanted him to be the sort of billionaire who occupied every doorway and called it leadership.
Instead, he noticed weight distribution.
I set a fractured petal into the discard crate.
"There is another problem," I said. "You did not ask whether I wanted marriage at all. Not this marriage. Marriage."
For the first time, something like embarrassment crossed his face.
"Do you?"
"That question arrived late."
"It still deserves an answer, even if the answer is none of my business."
I hated that too.
"I wanted it once," I said. "Not the wedding. The permanence. Someone who would know the cost of my work and not treat my ambition as a phase I would outgrow when his life became more important."
Luca listened without interrupting.