Chapter 16 #2
“You’ll explode if you eat ten pancakes.” I poke his stomach teasingly. “You’ll become a balloon and start floating away, and then I’ll have to run after you to catch you.”
“No I won’t!” He giggles.
“A huge balloon,” I insist, “and I’ll have to tie a rope around your leg and all the birds will become your friends.”
He just laughs as if I’m the funniest person in the world. “Okay. Five pancakes!”
“How about two and then we have a snack afterwards?” I suggest.
He makes a huge show of being disappointed but then nods.
As we sit down to eat, the silence between Grayson and me stretches. Ethan doesn’t seem to care. “Miranda?”
I look down. “Mm?”
He’s holding ChuChu’s ear, tilting the bear’s worn face up toward me with a small, earnest expression.
“Are you staying forever now?”
The fork stops moving in my hand.
The whole kitchen goes still for one beat. In front of me, I see Grayson’s coffee mug pause halfway to his mouth.
“For a while, buddy,” I answer.
“How long is a while?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But not forever.”
“I really don’t know.”
He thinks about this, frowning. Then he nods, peace made, and digs into his breakfast.
Later that day, Brooke’s couriered boxes arrive at the front gate.
Three of them. The sum of my life. Stacked on a hand truck, rolled up the gravel by a delivery driver who doesn’t look at the mansion behind me. Doesn’t ask why a hospital ID lanyard is taped to the top box.
Linda, who arrived just an hour after breakfast, carries the first two upstairs before I can stop her. I follow with the third pressed against my ribs. She sets the boxes inside Grayson’s bedroom door and turns to me.
“I’ve cleared the second sink in the bathroom for you, dear. There’s space in the closet on the left. You’ll want to hang anything that wrinkles. The drawers crease blouses.”
“Thank you, Linda.”
She pauses in the doorway and adds without quite meeting my eyes, “The right side of the bed has the better lamp. If you read at night.”
Then she leaves.
I stand in the middle of Grayson’s bedroom holding a box. Not for the first time today, I ask myself what I’m doing. How did I get all the way from treating Grayson’s wound and finding him so insufferable to now being his fake fiancée?
Sighing, I sit on the bed and open the box.
Brooke has folded my clothes with more care than I would have. There’s a note on top in her handwriting. Call me when you can. I love you. Don’t die. I press my mouth shut and put the note in the bedside drawer. If I look at it for one more second, I’ll lose my composure entirely.
Then I unpack.
Two work shirts, three pairs of jeans, my one nice dress, the green one I bought four years ago for a friend’s wedding. A sweater my mother knitted me the winter before she got sick. A handful of socks, underwear, a bra I’ve repaired three times.
I hang the dress in the closet on the left beside a row of suits worth more than my yearly rent. My green dress looks tired next to them. I close the closet door.
In the bathroom, I open the cabinet above the second sink.
Empty. Linda has wiped it down. There’s a single hook on the inside of the door where she’s hung a hand towel for me.
I put my toothbrush in the holder.
His is already there. White, electric, sleek. Mine is the plastic drugstore type with bristles starting to fan. They sit beside each other in one small holder. For some reason, that nearly undoes me.
Two toothbrushes in one holder.
I put my hairbrush on the counter. My face cream. Three bottles in a row. They take up almost no space.
“You moved in fast.”
I spin around.
Grayson is leaning in the doorway with a small velvet box in one hand.
My stomach drops. I refuse to dignify the sensation with a name.
He walks in. The bathroom shrinks to closet dimensions. His eyes flick once to the toothbrush holder. Something I can’t read crosses his face. Then he turns to face me properly and sets the velvet box on the counter beside my face cream.
“For tonight,” he announces.
I don’t move. “What is it?”
“What do you think it is, Miranda?”
“Drugs?”
The corner of his lips twitches. “Yes, because I will give you drugs in a ring box.”
He opens it.
The ring sits in dark velvet. Old gold. A single stone the size of my thumbnail. Smaller ones banding the sides. It catches the bathroom light, throwing it back in pieces.
I stop breathing for a full second.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It belonged to my grandmother,” he murmurs. “I had it resized for you. The provenance is documented. If anyone digs, it holds up.”
I swallow. “Grayson, are you sure you want to give me this? It’s precious. I can wear a ten-dollar ring—”
“No. If you’re going to pretend to be my fiancée, I want to do it right.” The way he says it has my heart fluttering again. Stupid thing.
“Hold out your hand,” he murmurs, and I move before I can think.
His fingers close around mine. Always warm. He turns my palm up, then over. His thumb passes once across my knuckle. Slowly.
He slides the ring onto my finger.
It fits exactly.
His thumb hasn’t moved. It rests against the back of my hand, pinning the band in place. I should pull my hand back. I’ve pulled my hand back from this man a dozen times in the last few months. My fingers should already be retreating.
They don’t retreat.
“You can let go now,” I inform him.
He doesn’t.
“Grayson.”
“I’m looking.”
“At what?”
“How it looks on you.”
My mouth turns dry, and I say hoarsely, “I mean it, Grayson. I have no problem with some cheap ring. You don’t have to—”
“I know.” His lips twist into something that is anger but not quite. “You’re always happy with the bare minimum.” His hand tightens around mine, and my eyes lift to meet his gaze. “But I’m not satisfied with that.”
His other hand comes up slowly, giving me all the time in the world to step back. He doesn’t touch my face. His fingers hover a breath from my jaw, close enough that I feel the warmth of him near my hairline.
I don’t move.
I hate that I don’t move.
My pulse is loud in my own ears, his proximity doing things to my brain. “I—”
Ethan’s voice carries up the stairs. “MIRANDA! Are you here?”
The moment shatters.
I step back. Grayson releases me without a sound. I duck past him through the bedroom, into the hall. Three steps down the corridor, I stop. I press my palm flat against the wall and breathe.
I look down at my hand.
The ring is heavy. The band is warm from his fingers. I can still feel where his thumb passed across my knuckle.
This is fake, I tell myself.
My body is having a stupid reaction to a man paying me to wear his grandmother’s ring.
This is a contract.
Tonight I sleep in his bed. That does not have to mean anything.
“Miranda!” It’s Ethan again, closer to the bottom of the stairs.
“Coming.”
I find him in the living room with a picture book about a duck who has misplaced his hat. I sit on the couch beside him and read the book three times. Reading aloud to a four-year-old is something I can do with shaking hands.
The ring catches the lamp light every time I turn a page.
I make myself stop looking at it. Twice. A third time.
Linda walks past with a basket of folded laundry. She gives me a small private smile that I decide immediately not to interpret.
By dinner, the engagement story is live.