Chapter 4 #2
His jaw worked, only slightly.
“Careful,” he said.
That irritated me instantly. “With what?”
“With confusing appetite for conviction.”
I went still.
“Wanting a woman,” he said, “is not the same thing as being prepared to treat her well and to be successful you must treat your wife like a queen.”
I rose before the conversation could become more useful than I wanted it to be. “I have a meeting.”
My father nodded once, as if he had not put a blade directly into the center of the thing I was trying not to name. “Then go.”
I made it back to my office with my jaw tight and my patience gone.
Roman looked up when I came in.
“How bad?”
“So very bad.”
I ignored that and crossed to my desk. My phone buzzed. Then buzzed again. Then again.
Hope, in the group chat my mother believed she’d named something normal and not completely obscene:
FAMILY I glanced down.
Hope: What color should I wear to Adrien’s dinner thing Friday?
Miley: No one say black because you always say black.
Maman: Kelly joon? Are you free for lunch tomorrow?
I needed to talk to Kelly first. We should plan the weekend.
My thumb moved before I thought better of it.
Me: She’s busy.
I set the phone down.
Roman looked up from across the room and said, “Tell me you didn’t just read you telling mom no when involving Kelly.”
I sat behind my desk. “Don’t say a word.”
“So you want to die a slow death.”
My phone buzzed once more. Private text.
Kelly: Stop answering for me.
I smiled before I could stop it. Maman had added her into the chat last night.
I typed back to Kelly: We need to talk.
Kelly: Why? I hate you.
I looked at the screen for one beat longer than necessary.
Then I typed fast. No, you don’t. You want me naked.
I set the phone down before she could answer, because there were certain patterns I was not going to indulge while I was still trying to think.
Roman watched the whole thing with the expression of a man who had been handed gossip better than work and intended to enjoy it.
“You’re an idiot,” he said.
I believed him.
The next three hours were pure discipline.
Meetings and contracts. A call with Singapore.
A product issue that needed immediate decisions.
A legal question Jeff routed up through counsel.
By the time noon hit, I’d almost managed to forget the feeling of Kelly’s door shutting in my face and replace it with more manageable annoyances.
Then my mother sent me a photograph.
Kelly, Britney, Avril, Hope, Miley, and Isabel seated at some sunlit brunch table in Virgin Cove.
Glasses on the table. Coffee. Flowers. Six women in varying stages of beauty and danger.
Kelly in profile, laughing at something one of them had said, though even in the still image she had the tightness around herself, clearly holding in with effort.
I stared at the photo too long.
Then typed to my mother. Stop inviting Kelly to things until I speak to her.
Then I set the phone facedown.
Roman, still across the room because we were sharing space all day like men who enjoyed each other when in fact we merely tolerated similar air well, said, “That expression never leads anywhere useful.”
I leaned back in my chair. “She’s at brunch with your wife and all her friends.”
He lifted one shoulder. “Most women do that without destabilizing technology companies.”
“She’s not destabilizing anything.”
“You texted our mother not to invite her anywhere before you could speak to her. I’d call that measurable destabilization.”
“Do I have a mirror behind my desk for you to know that?”
“No, maman wants an update on you because you said that.”
I gave him a look.
He smiled.
The afternoon dragged. Because my attention kept spliting around a practical reality I couldn’t ignore anymore.
Kelly was going to keep saying no if I framed this as my problem. She might even keep saying no if I framed it as our problem.
But if I framed it as what my plan was, a limited arrangement that allowed her to retain control over the social damage and me to contain the thing I’d already started, then maybe she’d hear enough reason in it to stop reacting to the shape of the insult and look at the structure underneath.
By four I had her schedule from the family group chat. Kelly was showing a townhouse in Virgin Cove at five-thirty with the agent under whose brokerage she’d recently licensed. After that, she was free.
I left the office and then Manhattan before Roman could comment.
The drive back out to the coast gave me forty minutes to decide whether I was making a tactical error or the only possible move.
By the time I parked outside the townhouse development, I had narrowed it down to this one fact. Kelly was angry because she’d been cornered. So the only way she listened was if I gave her room inside the argument.
The townhouse she was showing sat in a clean line of expensive coastal properties built to look relaxed while charging aggressively for it.
Pale clapboard. Trim hedges. Good light.
Better location than substance. I sat in the car long to see Kelly walking the prospective clients to the front step with another woman I recognized from a local brokerage event.
Kelly was all business. Warm smile. Hair pulled back.
Clipboard in one hand. The sort of focused, grounded version of her that made immediate sense with the teacher background.
She was good with people when she wanted to be.
Open without being soft. Present without giving away more than she intended.
She saw me the second her clients drove off. I knew because her shoulders changed, just enough. She said something to the other agent, who turned, followed Kelly’s line of sight to my car, and then looked back at her with a whole conversation in one expression.
I got out before Kelly could decide to pretend she hadn’t seen me.
She met me halfway across the little front path, stopping far enough away that even in public the distance read as deliberate.
“What are you doing here?”
I looked at the townhouse. “Good light. Inferior kitchen.”
“Leave.”
“Not yet.”
Her mouth went flat. “Do you have a personality disorder?”
“Several.”
“That tracks.”
The other agent had tact enough to vanish inside, which I appreciated.
“Two minutes,” I said.
“No.”
I glanced past her at the empty street, then back at her face. “If you’d like to do this here, in front of your colleague, I’m perfectly comfortable.”
That got me a real reaction. A flash of murder in blue-green eyes.
Then she jerked her chin toward the side walkway. “One minute.”
Kelly folded her arms. “Talk.”
“My mother texted you.”
Her brows lifted. “That is an incredible opening. Were you hit on the head?”
“She invited you to lunch.”
“Observant.”
I ignored that. “She asked what you were wearing for Friday in the group chat.”
“She certainly is making a hobby of me.”
“Graduation weekend has already made her plans bigger for you.”
That quieted her slightly. I kept going.
“If I walk it back now,” I said, “you become the woman I falsely claimed and then publicly lost which doesn’t help anyone looking to buy in Manhattan or Virgin Cove to trust you.”
Her jaw tightened.
“If you walk it back,” she said, “you become the man who used me to get out of being set up and corrected the record so his mother puts him back on the market.”
My shoulders tightened. “Yes.”
“So we both have something in this.”
She laughed once. “I am going to have to kill you.”
“Probably.”
“At least you are aware.”
The wind lifted a strand of hair loose from where she’d secured it and blew it across her cheek. She brushed it back with fast, irritated fingers. God help me, I noticed too.
“Say I do nothing,” she said. “If I ignore your mother and your group chat and your nonsense and let you clean it up.”
“We both know you’re smarter than that.” I took one step closer. “And I know my family.”
She stared at me.
I held the silence as she glanced up at me.
Then, quieter, I said, “My mother already thinks you’re coming to lunch.
She already thinks you’re at graduation weekend with me.
Charlie’s already treating this like a sport.
If I say I lied, you don’t become uninvolved.
You become embarrassed. And despite your proclamations you actually like the head on my shoulders. ”
Her lips parted, then pressed together again.
She looked away first, over the fence toward nothing . “You are the worst.”
“Sometimes.”
“I’m aware.”
Her laugh this time held no humor at all. “But I don’t like thinking about what Britney said about you.”
“Britney must realize that you are not a nameless nothing to me. You’re Kelly.”
“She has an exhausting commitment to me not making stupid choices.”
I winced but nodded once. “I completely get it.”
Her gaze snapped back to mine when I made a throat sound and then said, “This will be a temporary arrangement where we both get wins.”
She opened her mouth. I cut in before she could bury the whole thing under fury. “And it’s only a few days, through graduation weekend.”
That stopped her.
“Four days,” I said. “Dinner Friday. Family things through Sunday. Enough to let this settle into something our families believe was real and ended quietly after, if we choose to end it after.”
She looked at me for a long time.
Wind moved between us.
I kept my voice even. “You don’t have to like it. I’m not asking you to. I’m telling you that in four days my mother has already built an entire social structure around one sentence. This contains it.”
Kelly shook her head slowly. “You understand this is insane and this fake dating led every single one of our friends and your brothers into their current wedded bliss.”
“Yes.”
She nodded and sighed. “Also yes.”
I reached for her hand. “And you think you just agreed.”