Chapter 3
Crow
Selling a lie to a town is a logistics problem, same as anything else. You need a supply chain of small, believable details, delivered on schedule, to enough people that the story develops its own momentum and starts running without you.
I am, if I'm being honest with myself, extremely good at logistics.
"Say it again," Saint said, from his stool at the clubhouse bar, watching me review the engagement announcement I'd drafted like it was a contract instead of a sentence about being in love. "The part about how you met."
"We met at The Anchor. Three weeks ago. I was there about a supply route through her land, and—"
"Boring. Nobody's going to believe two people fell for each other over a supply route. You need a detail. Something specific. People believe specific things."
"This from the man who thinks the height of romance is bringing a woman a ring pop."
"That was a joke that got out of hand, and you know it.
" Saint took a slow sip of his coffee. "I'm serious, though.
You need a moment. Something you can both repeat exactly the same way, because Marta at The Anchor is going to interrogate you separately, and if your stories don't match down to the weather, she'll know. "
He wasn't wrong. I'd built enough cover stories in this life to know the ones that survive scrutiny aren't the elaborate ones — they're the small, oddly specific ones, because nobody invents a detail like she was annoyed I ordered the same thing she did.
Real memories have texture. Lies need borrowed texture, stitched in carefully.
"She spilled wine on my jacket," I said, working it out loud. "Reaching for a napkin, knocked her glass, got it all over my sleeve. She apologized so aggressively I ended up comforting her about it instead of the other way around."
Saint grinned. "See, now that's believable. Mostly because it sounds like something that would actually annoy you."
"It would."
"Good. Use it."
I drove up the coast road that afternoon with the announcement finalized, the prenup signed two days earlier by both of us in a lawyer's office that smelled like old paper and stronger coffee than the occasion warranted, and a strange, low static in my chest I didn't have a category for yet.
Not nerves. I don't get nerves. Something closer to the feeling of running a plan I'd built myself and hitting the part where you find out if the math actually holds when it meets the real world.
The wind hit me about two kilometers out.
It came off the sea in a long, hot gust that shoved the bike sideways hard enough that I had to correct twice, and by the time I pulled up the villa's drive, the lemon trees were bent sideways like they were bowing to something, leaves flashing silver-side-up in a way that meant only one thing on this coast.
Isla was on the terrace, wrestling the shutters closed one at a time, hair torn loose from whatever knot she'd started the day with, and she looked up at me with an expression that had absolutely nothing to do with fake engagements.
"Sirocco," she said, like it explained everything, which, on this coast, it more or less did.
"I noticed."
"It's early this year." She fought the second shutter latch, lost, and I crossed the terrace and got my hand over hers on the metal, both of us shoving together until it clicked.
She stepped back fast once it caught, putting distance between us like the shutter had somehow been the dangerous part of that exchange. "Thank you."
"You get these often?"
"Every summer. Usually not this early, and usually not this hard." She squinted out at the vineyard, where the rows were thrashing in unison, a green ocean answering the real one below the cliff. "It'll blow for two, three days. Sometimes more. Everyone just — closes up. Waits it out."
"Sounds unpleasant."
"It's not, actually." She started toward the last set of shutters on the east wall, and I fell in beside her without being asked, because it seemed like the practical thing to do, and also because I wasn't in a hurry to leave, which I noted and did not examine too closely.
"It's strange. Everyone in town gets quiet during a sirocco.
Slower. It's like the wind gives everyone permission to stop performing for a few days. "
"Careful," I said. "We're supposed to be performing for the next several weeks. I'd hate for the wind to talk you out of the assignment."
That got the laugh out of her again, the real one, short and startled, like it kept surprising her every time it happened.
"I signed the contract, Roman. I'm not backing out over some hot wind.
" She got the last shutter latched and turned to face me properly, arms crossed, the loose strands of her hair whipping sideways even in the relative shelter of the terrace.
"Speaking of the assignment. Marta called an hour ago.
Apparently word's already out that we've been seen together twice, and she wants us at The Anchor tomorrow night. Officially. Together. As a couple."
"That's fast."
"This is a small town during a slow news month. You're lucky it took this long."
"Then we should get our story straight." I told her the wine version — the napkin, the aggressive apology, the jacket sleeve — and watched something shift across her face, somewhere between amusement and reluctant respect.
"That's good," she admitted. "Specific. Annoying enough to be believable." She considered it a second longer. "What kind of wine?"
"Does it matter?"
"It absolutely matters. If Marta asks and we say different wines, we're finished before we've started."
"Red," I said. "You're clumsy with red wine specifically, because you get more animated when you talk and animated hands and full wine glasses are a bad combination."
"I resent that characterization."
"Is it inaccurate?"
She opened her mouth, closed it again, which I took as confirmation.
The wind kept building through the afternoon while we went over the story a dozen different ways, sitting at the same stone table where we'd negotiated the contract two weeks earlier, except now the pergola's vines were thrashing overhead and every few minutes a gust would come through strong enough to send the legal pad's pages fluttering, and she'd slap a hand down on it, laughing, and say something about the wind having opinions about our lie.
By evening the whole coast had gone the color of a bruise, purple-gray clouds stacking up over the water though no rain seemed likely, just wind and more wind, and she made us dinner — simple, bread and cheese and tomatoes from a garden that was somehow still standing despite the gale trying to flatten it — and we ate on the sheltered side of the terrace with the shutters banging softly against the stone every few minutes like something knocking to be let in.
"Can I ask you something?" she said, partway through, in the specific tone of someone who'd been building up to a question for a while and had finally decided to just say it.
"You keep asking that like I might say no."
"You might."
"Ask anyway."
"Why the club?" She turned her wine glass slowly on the table, not drinking, just turning it.
"You don't seem like the others. Reaper, from what I hear, runs on instinct and threats.
Diesel apparently proposed to a barista with a ring pop, which is a sentence I still can't quite believe is true.
You're — different. Careful. I keep trying to figure out how someone like you ended up there. "
I thought about how to answer that honestly without handing her more of myself than the contract required, and found, somewhat to my own surprise, that I wanted to answer it honestly anyway.
"My father wasn't in the club," I said. "He worked the docks his whole life, did everything right, saved everything he could, and a shipping company he'd never even heard of restructured its routes one year and put four hundred men out of work in a single afternoon.
No warning. No plan. Just — gone. I watched him spend the rest of his life trying to rebuild something that got taken from him by people who never once had to look him in the eye while they did it.
" I turned my own glass, an unconscious echo of her gesture.
"The club isn't perfect. But it's built by people who look out for each other, who plan for the version of the storm that's coming instead of getting caught flat-footed by it.
I wanted to be useful to something like that.
Something that plans ahead so the people in it don't get left the way my father got left. "
She was quiet for a moment, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read, something that had shed all its earlier guardedness.
"That's not what I expected you to say."
"What did you expect?"
"Something about the motorcycles, honestly."
"The motorcycles are also good," I admitted, and got the laugh again, easier this time, less startled and more like something settling into a groove.
Outside, the wind kept climbing, rattling the shutters, bending the lemon trees nearly flat in the last gray light, and for a moment — just a moment — sitting across from her at that table with the whole sky churning overhead, the fake part of the arrangement felt very far away, and the rest of it felt uncomfortably, dangerously close.
"We should get our story straight for tomorrow," I said, mostly to remind myself what this was.
"We already did."
"Then we should go over it again."
She smiled at that, slow and a little too knowing. "Scared you'll forget which wine, Roman?"
"Terrified," I said, and meant it far less about the wine than either of us was pretending.