Chapter One #2
Must be because she was nice, Johnny thought as he headed back to the elevators. He could feel the women's gazes following him from the reception desk, and Rhea's in particular had a quality that went beyond annoyance—-it was the sharp, cataloguing stare of someone keeping score.
He took one last look at the girl over his shoulder and was not surprised to find her already lost in her reading.
She had a quilted case next to her, with an assortment of highlighters, pens, and sticky notes tucked behind its pockets.
And in her hands was a book that he could see was already causing multiple eyebrows to arch.
How to Study the Bible by Dwight L. Moody.
If it had been anyone else, Johnny would've bet it was just an act. Like someone thinking a pair of boots would make them a cowboy. But this girl, though...
Unaware as always of how she had left the strongest (and polarizing) first impressions on other people, Chelsea found herself genuinely fascinated just by observing the rhythm of activity that played inside the lobby like a classical piece.
More Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries than Grieg's Morning Mood, with deliveries coming through a side entrance, people in business attire going in every direction, either talking to each other or talking to someone on the phone, and then there was the maintenance staff with how they had mastered the art of blending in the background while making sure everything was fragrantly and meticulously spotless.
A young man appeared with a spray bottle and began misting the flower arrangement on the central table, circling it with the kind of concentration that suggested he took his job seriously regardless of whether anyone noticed.
Chelsea watched him and thought she understood that particular way of caring about something no one else saw. She understood it quite well, actually.
What a busy world this was, Chelsea mused as she reached for her book again. She wasn't quite sure if she'd fit in this type of world, but that was for another day to think about. In any case, if one knew the Who, the hows, whens, wheres, whys, and whats were all immaterial.
Minutes passed, and Chelsea forgot where she was as she highlighted certain verses in green—-instructions and commands that represented God's biblical green light. The opposite, she underlined in red. Anything about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit was highlighted in blue while—-
Oh.
Her phone buzzed, a message silently popping up on her screen. It was from Francine's law firm again, and as painful as it was to admit, they were really starting to get to her.
A few moments passed, and as her phone buzzed again, she reached for one of the magnetic bookmarks she had handy: a cute cat holding a banner that said Philippians 4:13.
It was a timely reminder, considering how her phone had lit up with a third, and then a fourth and a fifth message, all from the same law firm.
The sixth one, however, was from her stepmom.
Pick up. We need to talk. You can't keep avoiding me.
Chelsea drew an uneven breath. It wasn't that she was avoiding Francine, but she just needed more time to understand what God wanted her to do. It wasn't that she cared so much about the money, but—-
"Did you really think I wouldn't know?"
Oops.
Chelsea's gaze was rueful as her godfather sat next to her on the chaise.
Edgar Coolidge was in his early seventies but moved like he was twenty years younger.
And since he also looked very much like Dustin Hoffman, Chelsea could see how his presence was attracting a lot of attention from other women.
"I'm sorry, I didn't want to cause you additional trouble."
"So you decided to give me a heart attack instead?"
Chelsea winced. "Is it really that bad an idea, coming here on my own?"
Edgar simply looked at her, and all she could do was smile sheepishly. His silence said everything. He had warned her repeatedly that coming here on her own was a bad idea. But...she was willing to take the risk, and Edgar had already done so much for her.
"I'm sorry, Edgar. I guess...I'm still a little impatient."
Edgar's gaze bored through hers. "A little?"
Chelsea could only laugh. "Okay, fine. It's the one thing I've never been able to outgrow. But surely you see why I'm doing this? I can't live the rest of my life until I know for sure—-"
The sound of Edgar's phone ringing cut her off.
"You can take it," Chelsea said. "I'm suddenly feeling thirsty." She pointed to the vendo machine near the elevators. "Do you want me to get anything?"
"I think they have black tea here."
"How very fancy," she teased, but Edgar only rolled his eyes. As she walked away, she heard him answer the call in an unusually somber voice. Hmm. She had never heard him speak like that, and he was already retired. Could it be about work? Or someone he knew personally?
Chelsea found herself absently thinking about these things as she ordered her can of coffee from the vendo.
The machine was one of those sleek, touchscreen kinds that offered about forty different beverages with names that sounded more like incantations than drinks.
She spent longer than she should have trying to find a simple black tea, and when she finally located it (under "Heritage Infusions," honestly), she tapped her card and waited.
She was still trying to figure out if she should've ordered English Breakfast or Earl Grey (Edgar had opinions about these things, but she could never remember which way they went) when she tapped her card to order the second drink and—-
One moment the lobby was its usual orchestrated self, and the next a woman with a press badge was cutting through the crowd with the focused velocity of someone who had been waiting for a specific elevator to open, recorder already extended, and Chelsea, who had just straightened up—-
Aaah!
The journalist came out of nowhere, carelessly shoving Chelsea out of the way because she had her eyes on the prize and nowhere else. Caught off guard, Chelsea didn't have the time, the strength, or the presence of mind to figure out how to make her injured leg maintain its precarious balance—-
Oh no!
She could only brace herself for impact, just waiting for the inevitable to do its damage.
But instead...
Huh?
Someone had caught her, an arm going around her waist as she was pulled back and upright in a single movement.
In a blink, Chelsea found herself standing, steadied, her back against something solid while the lobby erupted around her and then, just as quickly, resolved itself—-security appearing, the journalist being redirected, voices and then no voices.
The arm stayed.
Not loosening. Not tightening. Just...there.
Around her waist, holding her against what she now realized was someone's chest, and that chest was doing what chests generally did, which was rise and fall with breathing, except this particular rise and fall had a slowness to it that made Chelsea suddenly very aware of her own breathing, which was the opposite of slow and getting less so by the second.
Warm.
That was the thought that arrived first, before any of the useful ones like who is this or why is his arm still around me or should I say something.
This arm...
It belonged to someone whose touch was...warm.
The kind of warm that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the fact that for three years, the only people who had touched her were wearing medical gloves and asking her to rate her pain on a scale of one to ten.
No one had held her like this.
Not like she was a patient. Not like she was fragile. Just like she was a person standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he had fixed that, and now the fixing was done but neither of them had gotten around to the part where he let go and she stepped away and they became strangers again.
The arm loosened.
She turned.
He was already looking at her.
Dark eyes, the kind that had depth to them rather than just color, set in a face that had been put together with the sort of exactness that left nothing to chance.
He was tall in a way that reorganized the space around him without effort, and he was looking at her the way she imagined people looked at variables they hadn't accounted for: still, assessing, not unkind but not warm either, something being decided behind his eyes that she wasn't privy to.
Chelsea's brain, which had been doing a reasonable job of functioning until about ten seconds ago, quietly announced that it would not be offering any further assistance at this time.
Because she had seen handsome before. She had seen handsome in magazines that the nurses left in the ward's common room, and handsome in the K-dramas that her roommate had insisted on watching during rehab, and she had understood the concept of handsome the way she understood the concept of, say, Antarctica: it existed, it was impressive, but she hadn't expected to find herself standing in the middle of it.
This man wasn't handsome the way the actors in those dramas were handsome.
He was handsome the way a building was handsome.
The way this lobby was handsome. Structured.
Exact. Every angle doing exactly what it was supposed to do, and all of it adding up to something that made her knees feel like they were renegotiating the terms of their employment.
And then his gaze dropped.
Just once, briefly, to her dress, and she was almost tempted to squirm with how his gaze lingered on the flowers (were they really that offensive to this all-black crowd of corporate living?) before sliding back to meet her eyes.
But when his gaze came back up, something had changed in it. Not much. Just a fraction of a degree, the way a compass needle shifted when it found north. As if the flowers had told him something he wasn't expecting, and he was filing it away somewhere she would never be allowed to see.
Oh.
Chelsea's heart, which had been doing something complicated since the moment she'd nearly fallen, did something further.
She didn't understand it exactly. She'd spent three years largely horizontal and the two years before that largely invisible, and the sum total of her experience with men who looked like this was essentially zero, and she was fairly certain that none of that explained what her heart was currently doing.
Chelsea took a deep breath.
Anyway.
She had to apologize and thank him for rescuing her, but just as her lips parted—-
"Hello, wife."
Low. Easy. Silky.
That was how he said it.
Like it was completely nothing to him to drop two words that would make her feel like the ground under her had suddenly opened up, and she was mentally falling, falling, falling...because he had called her his wife.
As in...his wife?
The thought alone had her heart beating fast, but the sound was far from poetic.
It was no gentle flutter that the heroines in her roommate's K-dramas always seemed to experience at moments like this, the delicate hand to the chest, the soft gasp.
This was a full-system cardiac revolt, the kind that made Chelsea's eyes drop to her left wrist on pure instinct, to the smartwatch Edgar had made her promise to wear at all times.
'You're still recovering,' he had told her in that firm voice of his, the one that sounded like Dustin Hoffman playing a general. 'And until the doctors say otherwise, this stays on.'
She'd worn it every day since. It had become as much a part of her as the limp: a small, constant reminder that her body had tried to quit on her once and might try again, and that someone who loved her wanted a warning if it did.
The numbers on the screen blinked up at her. 118. 122. 127.
Red zone. The kind of spike that would have had nurses appearing in doorways eight months ago, clipboard in hand, already reaching for the blood pressure cuff.
But there was no pain. No dizziness. No tunnel vision, no ringing ears, no tingling in her fingers, none of the warning signs she'd memorized on laminated cards during those long, long months in rehab.
Just...this.
Just him, looking at her with those dark eyes that had an entire ocean's worth of depth, and her heart doing something it had never, ever done before, and the smartwatch confirming with its calm little numbers that she was, medically speaking, fine.
Which meant this wasn't a cardiac event.
But instead...
Gulp.
The truth was far more shameless, and it was that she was crushing on a total stranger—-no, wait, it was worse, actually.
She was crushing on a man whom she had mistaken for a total stranger, only to realize that he was the man she was legally married to.
..by means of a proxy wedding that had been arranged without her knowing.
Chelsea cast one last look at her smartwatch. Heart still beating faster than normal, but because there were no other red flags—-
Oh gosh.
This really was nothing but a full-fledged crush, and the thought had her swallowing hard.
Play it cool, Chels.
She mustered the courage to slowly lift her head, and the first thing she saw was him.
Watching her.
But she had no time to think about this, with Edgar coming up to them, and her godfather being his usual blunt self, he simply went straight to the point.
"Are introductions still needed...or should we continue somewhere private?"