CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BLAIRE
"Are you nervous, Blaire?"
Camille asks it from the chair behind me where she's closing out her laptop, and I realize my hands have found the hemline of my dress that I've been fussing with for the last thirty seconds without noticing.
I drop the fabric.
"I wouldn't say nervous." I turn back to the mirror. "This man vehemently dislikes me, and I don't know why. And now he's seen me practically naked."
I cringe at the memory. Ugh. On the one day I don't wear a bra.
"Well, this morning you said you considered robbing the bank next door, so you'd get arrested and couldn't go anywhere for the next few days."
I wave a hand. "Semantics."
I truthfully don't know why I'm nervous.
It's not even a real date. But I'm determined to get Bennet to at least stop openly hating me the way he seems to, and even if my brain knows the distinction, my anxiety can't help but remind me that I've never actually been on a real date before.
Colt didn't wine and dine me. We married in high school, and that was that.
Also — and I'm acknowledging this purely as an objective observation — Bennet Sullivan knocks Colt completely out of the park.
The man is insanely hot. And for one brief second this morning, before he schooled his expression back into contempt, I could have sworn I saw something else on his face entirely.
His eyes were definitely what the BookTok folks would call hooded.
"You look amazing," Camille says. "You've got this."
I stand a little taller, grateful that she knows what I need to hear at this moment.
She's right. I do look amazing; thanks to the small glam team she brought in and the dress.
She picked up a burgundy silk slip, loose and flowing but somehow still elegant, paired with turquoise sky-high heels that make a statement I never would have thought to make myself.
I don't have Camille's eye for these types of outfits, but I benefit enormously from it.
A knock at the door interrupted our conversation, and my stomach drops exactly the way I said it wouldn't.
"Calm down." Camille is already moving toward it. "It's just my food order. You look like you're about to jump out of your skin." She glances back at me with a grin she isn't trying to hide. "Not nervous. Ha!"
"Shut it, Cammy."
She opens the door.
It is not her fucking food order.
Bennet stands in my door, propped up against my door frame with his hands in his pockets.
Fuck, does this man know how to wear a suit.
The way the midnight black brings out the dark features of his eyes is a little mesmerizing.
Even dressed down with the two top buttons of his black button-up shirt undone, he is drool-worthily gorgeous.
It is hard not to stare, even with the bitterness I'm carrying around like a carry-on bag every time I see him.
Camille is blatantly staring at him with her mouth open, then finally she looks back at me.
Her expression says she understands several things simultaneously and is going to have a great deal to say about all of them later.
"Mr. Sullivan." I step forward before she can open her mouth. "This is my assistant, Camille. Cammy, this is our client, Bennet Sullivan."
"Pleasure," Camille says, with a warmth that is approximately forty percent professional and sixty percent fuck me, daddy.
Bennet's eyes have already moved past her to me.
For a moment it's the same look from the restroom this morning — dark and hooded, unhurried.
He runs his hand slowly along his jaw, and I realize I'm not imagining it.
He likes what he sees, and the knowledge of it gives me a confidence boost I wasn't expecting and absolutely needed.
"You ready?" he asks.
Not you look nice. Not good evening. Just — you ready.
"Uh. Yes, rip, roaring and ready, Freddy."
Fucking hell, woman.
Camille looks at me with raised eyebrows.
Fuck if I know, Cammy. Damnit.
I pick up my bag. Kiss Camille on the cheek and catch the look she gives me over my shoulder as I walk to the door, the one that says call me the second you get back.
I step into the hallway beside Bennet Sullivan, and the door clicks shut behind me, and for a moment neither of us moves toward the elevator.
We just stand there in the corridor with a very particular stillness.
We are just two people who have agreed to something and are now standing at the edge of it.
"Ground rules," I say.
He looks down at me with the expression he keeps on permanent rotation. "Already?"
"In public, we're convincing." I keep my voice even. "Whatever this is between us stays in the building. Out there, you like me and I like you. Genuinely enough that people believe it." I hold his gaze. "Can you do that?"
We stare at each other for a moment, and then his lips twitch.
“What?”
"I'm a very good liar, Mrs. Monroe," he says, and gestures a hand toward the elevator.
I fall into step next to him and think about the specific way he said that, and whether it's supposed to be reassuring or not, and decide I don't have an answer for that yet.
With his hand on my back, he leads me to the elevator and out into the building’s lobby, the whole time staying silent.
Right before leave the building to enter the waiting car, his hand finds mine.
He takes it without asking, fingers sliding between mine and interlacing with a confidence that suggests he does this all the time, which I know he doesn't, and the contact is so unexpected that I flinch before I can stop myself.
He looks down at me. "That's not the behavior of someone who likes me, Mrs. Monroe."
Then he brings my knuckles to his lips, eyes on mine over the back of my hand as he grazes them across my skin.
My mouth does not have a counterattack for that.
My vagina clearly does, clenching in response like it has opinions and intends to share them.
He escorts me across the lobby with my hand still in his and pushes the front door open, holding it open for me.
A car is waiting at the curb, the driver already out and standing.
Bennet opens the door himself before the driver can get there and gestures me in, waiting until I'm settled before he rounds the car and gets in on the other side.
The door closes, and the car pulls out into the city.
I become very aware that my hand is still warm where he held it, which is information I don't know what to do with, so I set it in my lap and look out the window and say nothing.
"We'll be at The War Keys in forty minutes, Mr. Sullivan." The driver's voice comes through before the partition rises and seals us in together.
Forty minutes.
I turn to him and reach for something neutral, something professional, something that might sand down whatever this dynamic is before we walk into a restaurant full of people who need to believe we chose each other.
"Maybe we can use the drive to learn a bit about each other? Where are you from originally?"
His jaw clenches first. Then his hands, fingers curling slowly into fists in his lap, like he's making a conscious decision about something.
"There’s not a single thing I want to know about you," he says, looking straight ahead, "and nothing you need to know about me.
This isn't a date." He turns then, and the way he looks at me strips every professional pretense out of the car.
"Your job is to look fuckable on my arm and smile for the cameras. Stick to what you're good at. Blaire."
I can't help the way my breath catches.
Of everything he's said to me since I've met him, this is the one that hits the final target.
My first name lands like an insult. Not because it's my name, because of how he says it. The specific weight he puts on it, like he picked it up and turned it over and found something ugly on the underside before he handed it back.
"Yes, sir," I say quietly, then turn back to the window and blink back tears, refusing to give him any more ammunition than he already has.
He's done enough damage.
***
I barely register that we've arrived until Bennet is stepping out of the car and coming around to my side. I put my game face on — the one I've been wearing since I was a teenager when I learned that a smile is armor — and take his extended hand.
The night air hits me as I immediately clock paparazzi, but Bennet notices them first. Before I can orient myself, he's pulled me into his chest, my back against the car, and suddenly he's right there, looking down at me with an expression doesn’t belong to the man who just told me my job was to look fuckable on his arm.
Whoever that man was, he's not here right now.
He reaches up and brushes a curl from my face, and I scowl at him. While this morning his beard had been full, he now had a neat trim all along his chiseled jaw. It gave him a sinister look. The suit hugging his broad shoulders probably cost more than Colt’s entire sweater wardrobe.
He leans down and runs his nose slowly up the length of my neck, his lips grazing my jaw, and I feel it everywhere.
"Three photographers behind us," he murmurs against my skin. "Two across the street." A beat. "Time to work."
Then his mouth is on mine.
It's too much kiss for public consumption, which I understand is entirely the point, but understanding it doesn't help me manage the reality of it all — the hand at the back of my neck, the mouth moving against mine with the kind of certainty that doesn't leave room for anything else.
I part my lips wider and get lost in the feel of his tongue sliding against mine, of the demand in his touch, of the way he pulls me harder against him with his hand at the small of my back.
It feels foreign and familiar at the same time, like I know his lips and his touch from another life that wasn't meant for me.
I fight the urge to cry and I don't know where it comes from exactly, except that I'm back here again — performing on a powerful man's arm, being the thing he points at when he wants people to look, back in the shape of a woman whose value lives and dies in what she looks like standing next to someone else.
I lean into the kiss anyway because that's the job and because I don't have another choice and because his mouth is doing things to my nervous system that I resent completely.
His grip tightens at my neck. I suck on his tongue, and a moan slips out of him that I know he didn't mean to make because he immediately goes still. But his breathing and the hard evidence against my stomach betrays any excuse he could conjure. So, I wait.
He pulls back just enough to speak.
"Good girl," he says against my lips, quiet enough that only I can hear it, and I have absolutely no idea what to do with the way my body responds to those two words from this man who despises me.
Then he takes my hand and walks us both inside like nothing happened.
I school my face into the smile that has never once failed me and walk beside him and think about the fact that I have six months of this ahead of me.
I am in so much fucking trouble.