3. Chapter 3
Isla
I'm sitting in a hair-and-makeup chair at six in the morning for the first officially staged photograph with my fake fiancé, and the quote from that article is still lodged in my chest like a splinter.
She will not be able to hide behind a ring.
I've been ignoring it for thirty-six hours with the determination of someone who has had a lot of practice ignoring things that are true.
It isn't working especially well this morning, possibly because it is six a.m. and I've had one coffee and a stylist is currently pinning my hair back with the intensity of a woman who takes her work more seriously than I am capable of taking anything at this hour.
Ivy Saunders drops into the chair beside me with her tablet and her color-coded brief and the energy of someone who has already been awake for two hours and finds this charming about herself.
Ivy is twenty-eight and relentlessly competent.
She has been assigned to manage our press narrative, which means she's about to become either my favorite person or my least favorite person, depending on what comes out of her mouth next.
"Love story," she says, pulling up the document. "Seeded six weeks ago at the Hartwell Foundation benefit. You were seated adjacent, he caught you before you spilled a glass of Sancerre on the deputy mayor, it went from there."
"Naturally," I say.
"He's self-made, you're old money, the contrast is good press. We'll lean into it without making it a thing." She makes a note. "The story is tight. The timeline holds. Just don't tell it differently to different people."
"Ivy. I have been managing my own press since I was nineteen."
She looks up from her tablet with the expression of someone who has read my file and has opinions about who I was at nineteen. "Right," she says. "So you know how this goes."
I do know how this goes. I smile through the briefing because I'm good at smiling.
Conrad is seated across the room in a chair that someone has brought him because Conrad Wrenwood does not stand when he can sit, reviewing the brief with the focused attention of a man who commissioned this operation and is here to observe its execution.
He hasn't looked at me directly since he arrived.
This is normal. Conrad expresses concern through logistics.
Ivy doesn't look up from her tablet. "What about your mother? For some of the public appearances — matriarch moment, warm family context. The press would love it."
I look at my father across the room. He does not look up.
"She's unavailable," I say.
Ivy waits, in the patient way of someone who has learned that waiting often produces more information than asking.
"What did you call it this time, Dad," I say, conversationally. "Spiritual reset? Wellness immersion?"
Conrad turns a page of the brief and acts like I haven't spoken.
I smile at Ivy. "It's just us," I tell her. "That's fine. Work with what we have."
Ivy, to her credit, writes something on her tablet and moves on without missing a beat. I add her to the favorite person column and pick up my coffee.
Beckett walks in from the adjacent dressing room at seven forty-five in a charcoal suit that fits like it was made for the express purpose of being inconvenient to my libido.
He stands still while Ivy straightens his lapel, and he is watching me in the mirror across the room with that flat, unreadable look that I'm starting to find infuriating in direct proportion to how little I can crack it.
He has been at this — the looking, the assessing, the filing things away behind his eyes — since the moment we met, and I can't tell what conclusions he's reaching and that bothers me more than it should.
"That suit deserves a better personality," I tell him.
The corner of his mouth moves approximately two millimeters. It is, I am realizing, as close to a smile as he gets before ten a.m., and possibly in general, and I file this away the way he files things and refuse to examine why.
"Ready?" Ivy asks.
Beckett looks at me. "Are you?"
"I'm always ready," I say, which is not entirely true but is the truest thing I am willing to say at seven forty-five in the morning in front of my father and a woman with a color-coded tablet.
The photographer positions us in front of a window with the city behind us and starts calling adjustments before I have fully registered that Beckett's hand is on my waist.
Not hovering. Not approximate. His hand is on my waist, thumb resting against my hip bone through the fabric of my dress, with the steady, anchored pressure of someone who has decided to do a thing and is doing it without apology.
He is looking at the camera. He is not looking at me.
He is holding the contact like it costs him nothing at all.
My skin has other opinions.
"Chin up a little," the photographer says. "Good. Now look at each other."
We look at each other.
Beckett's eyes in direct light are not just hazel — they have green in them, and something darker, and they do the same thing they do everywhere else, which is land on me with the quality of complete attention, the feeling of being seen rather than glanced at, and I understand at this moment that this is going to be the texture of the problem I am having.
"Perfect," the photographer says. "Hold that."
I hold it. I hold my expression and my posture and my breathing and every single thing I am currently feeling, which is considerable, because I'm good at holding things and I will continue to be good at holding things for as long as it takes.
Ivy calls an adjustment. I answer in a complete sentence. She calls another. I answer that one too.
Beckett's thumb does not move. His hand stays exactly where it is, warm through the fabric, and I spend the next twenty minutes being professionally photographed while my nervous system stages what can only be described as a protest.
That night, alone in my apartment, I cannot sleep.
I lie on top of my covers in the dark and I try, in order: counting backward from one hundred, running through my calendar for the next two weeks, mentally redecorating my bathroom, and thinking very deliberately about golf, the world's most boring sport.
None of it works. What my brain wants to think about is that hand on my waist. The weight of it, the exact pressure of his thumb against my hip, and I spend approximately forty-five minutes being annoyed about this before I stop fighting it.
Fine, I tell myself. Fine.
I close my eyes.
The fantasy unspools like film in a dark theater.
The photo shoot, but different this time.
His arm around my waist, yes, but instead of holding me at that careful, professional distance, his fingers flex.
His thumb presses in, and then his hand slides lower, curving over my hip, dragging the fabric of my dress up until his palm meets bare skin.
I draw a sharp breath in the dark of my bedroom, and in my mind, I feel the roughness of his calluses against the small of my back.
My hand drifts lower, fingers slipping beneath the waistband of my panties.
I'm already wet — have been for forty-five minutes, if I'm being honest with myself, which I apparently am now.
I trace a slow circle, and in the fantasy, Beckett spins me around to face him.
His hazel eyes are dark, jaw tight, that five o'clock shadow catching the studio lights.
He doesn't ask. He backs me into the wall, one hand pinning both my wrists above his head, the other shoving my dress up until it bunches at my waist.
My fingers slip lower and I push two inside with a soft, breathless sound. In the fantasy it's his fingers — thick and sure, curling just right — while his mouth finds my neck. He'd bite, I think. He seems like the type. A sharp sting, then the wet heat of his tongue soothing the mark.
He'd tell me to be quiet. That authoritative voice low and rough against my ear: Shh.
You don't want them to hear, do you? The photographer.
The assistants. Ivy. All close enough, if I'm not careful.
My thumb finds my clit, rubbing in tight, frantic circles, breath coming faster, and I'm already close — closer than I want to be, chasing something I have no business wanting this badly.
The orgasm hits me like a wave breaking.
I arch off the bed, a strangled moan escaping my throat, my inner walls clenching around my fingers while my clit pulses under my thumb.
I ride it out, hips rocking, chest heaving, the fantasy shattering into bright fragments behind my eyelids.
For one long, perfect moment, there's nothing but the aftershocks rolling through my body and the sound of my own ragged breathing.
Then reality reassembles itself. The dark ceiling. The hum of the heat kicking on. My hand, still between my thighs, slick with my own arousal. The wet spot on my panties.
Furious at myself. Unable to regret it.
I am going to have to look at him tomorrow.
I am going to have to stand next to him at our next arranged appearance and let him put his hand on my waist again and perform a relationship for a photographer, and I am going to do all of that with the composure I have been cultivating since I was old enough to understand that composure was the only armor available to me.
I am good at composure. I am excellent at it. I have, in fact, never in my life failed to perform composure when it was required.
I am thinking about this, about my exceptional track record, when my phone lights up on the nightstand.
Unknown number. A photograph.
I pick it up. I look at it.
It is my bedroom. My window. Me, in this bed, taken from outside, from a building across the street, right now, while I was lying here.
I sit up.
I call Beckett.
"Beckett." His voice is alert, immediately. He was not asleep.
"Someone just sent me a photograph," I say. My voice is level. I am very proud of it. "Of me. In my bed. Taken from the building across the street. Right now."
A pause — not long, half a second — and then: "Don't touch anything. I'm eleven minutes out."
He hangs up.
I sit on the edge of my bed with the phone in my lap and the photograph still on the screen, and that is when it occurs to me — now, after I've already made the call, after he is already eleven minutes out and there is nothing I can do about it — what else is in that photograph.
What is, objectively and inarguably, visible to anyone who looks at it carefully.
And Beckett looks at everything carefully.
I think about the building across the street, the window, the angle, because thinking about practical things is better than thinking about the alternative.
Third or fourth floor. Someone has been up there with a lens pointed at my apartment and I did not know, and now Beckett is going to be here in eleven minutes and he is going to ask to see the phone and I am going to have to hand it to him.
He is ten minutes and forty seconds out, as it turns out. I know because I count.
She will not be able to hide behind a ring.
The splinter works itself a little deeper. I breathe. I count the seconds. I wait for Beckett, and I try very hard not to think about what I am going to say when he asks to see the phone.