Chapter Two
“ABSOLUTELY NOT,” I tell him, which is a strange thing to hear coming out of my own mouth, given that I’d promised myself on the long drive in that whatever this man offered, I’d be cool about it, I’d be unbothered, I’d be the kind of woman who has men proposing fake engagements to her over porch lunch on a Tuesday and merely lifts one eyebrow.
So much for that.
I’m already turning, already two steps back toward the door and the truck and the rest of my dignified life, when his hand closes around my wrist from behind.
He’s faster than a man that size has any right to be, and the next thing I know my back’s against one of the cool stone posts that hold up his impossible porch, with forty miles of his own gold country rolling away behind me, and Loukas Karalis is close.
Close enough that the heat coming off him reaches me before he does.
Close enough that my pulse, the disloyal thing, leaps against the warm circle of his fingers, and I know he feels it, I know he does, the dark eyes holding mine a beat longer than a second ago.
I want this to make my skin crawl. I want it desperately, the way you want a glass of water in the night. Skin-crawling I could use. Skin-crawling would let me wrench free and drive home with my dignity in one piece. But that isn’t what happens.
What happens is warm and low and humiliating and entirely the opposite of crawling, and I hold onto my fury with both hands the way you hold a railing on a bad stair, the fury being the only thing on this porch I still trust.
“Let go of my wrist,” I tell him through my teeth.
“You walked before I finished.” He drawls it, unbothered, his hold not loosening by a degree. “Surely you know how much I dislike being walked out on.”
“And surely you know how much I dislike being pranked, so why don’t we both go home unhappy. Is that what this is? Some bet? Humiliate the shrew, eighteen years later, for old times’ sake?”
I tip my face up to deliver it, which turns out to be a tactical error of the first order, the kind I apparently specialize in, the kind that brings my mouth up to within a breath of his and turns the air between us thick and strange.
It’s the sort of strange where two people are either about to do murder or do something a great deal stupider, and with his fingers banded warm around my wrist and his eyes gone dark I couldn’t have told you, right then, which way it was going to break.
“Look at my face, Blythe.” His voice drops, the accent surfacing low enough that I feel it more than hear it. “Do I look like a man wasting an afternoon on a joke?”
He does not. That’s the trouble with him, it’s always been the trouble, he looks like a man who decided how this ends a while ago and is simply waiting, with infinite patience, for me to catch up.
Worse, the longer he holds my gaze the more I understand we’re standing far too close for two people who supposedly loathe each other, and that if one of us doesn’t say something cutting in the next second, the silence is going to fill up with something neither of us can take back.
So I cut. “If you’re not joking, then you’re desperate. Either way, let go—”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll bite your hand off.”
He lets go.
Good.
“Pity,” he murmurs, stepping back just far enough that I can think again, which I resent, having only just gotten used to not thinking. “If I’d let you do it, you’d have enjoyed it, and a man likes to save that sort of thing for the engagement.”
I should’ve known he’d find a way to turn my own teeth against me.
I open my mouth to inform him that I’d enjoy it the way a hawk enjoys a finger, all consequence and no romance, and what comes out instead is nothing, because Sensible Blythe has clapped a hand over both our mouths and is hissing that anything I say next is going to make this worse.
For once, I listen.
“Would you like to hear the terms,” he says, “or would you prefer to keep glaring? I’ve all afternoon for either.”
“I don’t care about your terms—”
He names a number.
I stop caring about not caring.
It’s a horrifying thing to feel happen in your own chest, the exact moment a number reaches in and changes your mind for you, and I hate that he watched it land, I hate that he knew it would.
There’s no harm in listening though, is there.
I’m not committing to a single thing. I’m a grown woman who can sit on a porch and let a man talk, and so I let him talk, and apparently there’s a train.
A real one, the kind they don’t make anymore, a restored luxury line he’s reviving out of San Antonio with a consortium of ranch and oil money he’s spent the last year charming. Sleeper cars. Crystal in the dining car.
A route that runs days instead of hours, west across the Hill Country and the high lonesome and on toward the mountains, the whole pitch being that the journey is the thing you’re paying for, that a man rich enough to fly anywhere in two hours might pay a great deal more to be unreachable for a week and call it luxury.
It sounds, against my every wish, rather wonderful. So wonderful that I know at once I’m not the customer. There’s no version of my bank account that survives one night of it.
“It isn’t my idea, strictly,” he goes on, in the tone of a man who dislikes admitting any idea isn’t strictly his.
“There’s a flagship already running in Japan, the proof of the whole concept.
A luxury cruise line on rails called the Yume, a joint venture with their national government, booked out a year ahead.
My partner there built it. Yuki Himura.” A pause.
“It’s a serious, respectable thing, before you decide it’s a rich man’s toy.
People marry off the back of it. We’re bringing the model to America, and the model is couples only. ”
“Couples only,” I repeat blankly.
“It’s built on a romantic idea, and a true one.
Intimacy, nostalgia, the lost art of being unreachable together for a week.
People believe in it, they pay handsomely for it, and the ones in Japan step off it engaged.
” His mouth does something wry and cool.
“I happen to be the worst possible man to sell it, which is its own private joke. The format requires me to arrive with a woman on my arm and look as though I mean it, and I’d sooner spend the week beside one I’m paying by the day than one who’d start believing the brochure by the second morning. ”
“And you assume I won’t,” I say.
“I know you won’t.” He doesn’t blink. “You’d rather chew glass than picture the real thing with me. That’s the whole reason it’s you.”
He’s right, and I resent how right he is, and there’s a warm snag under my ribs that I would dearly love to file under irritation, irritation being safe and the other thing being its exact opposite. So I do what I always do, the move that’s gotten me precisely nowhere with him in eighteen years.
“You could be wrong about me,” I tell him.
He smiles, slow and insufferable, like a man watching a card he’s already counted come up exactly where he left it. “There. I knew you’d say something like that, purely to needle me. You’ve never once been able to leave a thing alone if leaving it alone would let me win.”
The worst part isn’t that he’s right. The worst part is the smile. The smile makes him more dangerous to look at, not less, and a sensible woman would’ve learned by now to stop looking. I’m, apparently, not yet that woman.
“Why fake,” I press, because pressing is safer than sitting here being read like a feed invoice. “You’re rich, you’re new in town, and half the ranching daughters in three counties have decided you’re the catch of the season. Bring a real one. Rent a real one. Why does it have to be a performance?”
For the first time, something closes over his face, a shutter coming down behind those black eyes, and the temperature of the whole conversation drops a degree.
“That’s mine to keep,” he says, closing the subject.
“That’s not an answer,” I object.
“It’s the only one you’re getting.” He says it evenly, and then, before I can push, he lays it down like a single clean card.
“I’ll tell you what I can tell you. There’s a reason it has to be a woman no one can move, and there’s a reason I won’t explain it in this room.
What I’ll swear to you, on anything you like, is that nothing about this is illegal, and nothing about it is anything your conscience would object to.
You won’t be asked to break a law or a confidence.
You’ll be asked to hold my hand at dinner and look like you mean it. That’s the entire job.”
And here’s what being raised by a woman who worked three jobs and trusted exactly no one does to you.
I know the shape of a man deciding how little he can get away with telling me.
I’ve negotiated with suppliers who do it, with the county, with every man who ever assumed the nice lady with the birds would take what she was handed and say thank you. I know the shape of it cold.
What I don’t know is why I’m still on this porch.
“All I have to do,” I say slowly, “is hold your hand and look at you without glaring.”
“That’s the job.”
“That’s going to be the hardest money I’ve ever earned.” But I’m thinking about the number again, and the north wall, and the kitchen drawer I’ve trained myself not to open, and he watches me think about it, and I hate that too.
“So we’re bargaining,” he murmurs. “Good. I’m listening.”
“Here’s my counter.” I make my voice cool, the way I do with the county, the way I do with men who think a tired woman is an easy one.
“You want me to trust you without the why. You want me to get on a train and hand you a week of my life and never ask the question you won’t answer.
Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll trust you blind.” I square my shoulders.
“But trust runs both ways, Loukas, or it isn’t trust, it’s just me doing as I’m told.
So you’ll prove yours the only way a man like you knows how.
You’ll pay me. All of it. Up front, in full, before I set one foot on that platform.
Not on completion. Not held against my good behavior.
Every dollar, in my account, while I’m still free to change my mind. ”
I expect him to balk. I want him to balk, honestly. A balk would let me feel righteous and leave.
He doesn’t balk.
He considers me for a long moment, and the closed-off look gives, just slightly, on something that might almost be approval if I believed him capable of it, and then he names a second number, higher than the first, higher than I’d have dared ask, and he says it very quietly, in that accent that thickens when he’s decided he’s won.
“That should cover the north wall, the tax lien, and Dr. Abacan’s last three invoices. I’d round up for the kite, but I’m told he can’t be bought either.”
I want to smile. I manage a grimace, and somewhere underneath it, in a place I’m not going to look at directly, a small cold voice wants to know why it feels like I’ve just made the worst mistake of my life.