Page 8 of The Rancher's Fake Fiancée
A bell chimes through the wall, bright and merciless.
“First dinner service,” comes a steward’s voice from the corridor, muffled and cheerful and catastrophically well-timed, “in twenty minutes, Mr. Karalis.”
He steps back, and I nearly wilt against the paneling, only now noticing I’d been holding my breath the entire time, that my lungs have been off doing something other than their one job.
We come apart like two people who’ve touched a hot stove, except nothing touched, that’s the part that’ll keep me up tonight on my half of the one bed, that nothing touched and I felt the whole of it anyway.
“Twenty minutes,” he tells the glass, his voice not entirely his own. “You’ll want to change. They’ll all be watching how we’re together.”
“And how are we together?” I ask the room, the question coming out smaller than I meant it.
He looks at me then, and for a moment he doesn’t seal himself off, for a moment he just lets me see the thing that’s as inconvenient for him as it is for me.
Then he reaches for his dinner jacket, and whatever I saw is gone, sealed back up behind those black eyes.
“Engaged,” he says smoothly. “Try to remember it’s the part where you’re supposed to like me.” He pauses at the door, and that slow certain curve comes back to his mouth. “Andagapi? You’ve got twenty minutes to decide how tonight goes. Play my adoring fiancée out there in front of all of them, or keep baiting me the way you can’t seem to help, and find out at last what itfeels like to be punished by a man who’s wanted to for eighteen years.”
Chapter Five
SO I’VE DECIDED TObe adoring.
I want it on the record that this is a business decision and nothing whatsoever to do with how a certain man left me against the paneling twenty minutes ago with a promise in my ear, and certainly nothing to do with my wanting, in some disgraceful back room of myself, to find out what the alternative felt like.
I made a deal. I took the money. A professional honors her contracts, and tonight the contract says I walk into this dining car on Loukas Karalis’s arm wearing his ring and a smile fit to light the place, and so that, gritted teeth and all, is what I do.
He notices, naturally. The man notices everything.
“Careful,agapi,” he murmurs against my hair as we step in, low enough for me alone. “A man might think you’d turned over a new leaf.”
“Don’t get used to it,” I murmur back, smiling for the room. “I’m only doing it for the money.”
“Naturally.” His hand settles at the small of my back, the heat of it coming through the silk, and I feel the curve of his mouth at my temple. “We’ll see how long the money holds you.”
And then I see her, and every clever thought in my head goes quiet.
The woman in the red coat from the platform is sitting at our table. Except she’s shed the coat, and she’s wearing my fiancé’sfirst name instead, draped over both syllables like she owns the rights to it.
“Loukas,” she says, the second time in under a minute, drawing it out slow and low, the voice you’d use to gentle something and keep it still, and I understand all at once, before a single fork’s been lifted, exactly why I’m here.
The dining car’s a long jewel box of a thing, white linen and brass-shaded lamps and crystal that throws little knives of brightness every time the train sways, the silver so heavy I’d nearly need both hands to lift it, and out past the black glass the country’s rushing by invisible in the dark, so the car feels like a sealed room flung through nothing, ten couples shut inside it with their money and their appetites.
A roomful of people sorts itself for me the same way an aviary does, into who holds still and who can’t, who’s settled and who’s only pretending, where the predator is and which way the predator’s looking. It takes me about as long as it takes to unfold my napkin.
The predator’s across the table, and she isn’t looking at me at all.
She’s looking at the man whose arm is coming around my chair.
“You remember my wife,” says the man beside her, and there’s such plain happiness in his voice it takes me a second to catch up. He’s older than her by a good twenty years, soft and silver and beaming, a man built entirely of good cheer and bad eyesight where it counts, and when he looks at her his whole face opens like a window.
Artie, Loukas called him in the corridor, gripping my hand a degree too tight, the only warning I got. Artie Kraus, my oldestfriend in this business, you’ll like him. He hadn’t said one word about her.
He hadn’t needed to. She’s saying it all herself.
“Bettina,” the woman supplies, and she smiles at me with a great show of charm that stops a clean inch short of her eyes, then turns the same smile on Loukas and lets it thaw several degrees, a thermostat she works with insulting ease. “We’ve heard so much, and so suddenly. An engagement. To think you kept her a secret all this time, you wicked man.”
“Some things are worth keeping,” Loukas says smoothly, and his arm comes around the back of my chair, his hand settling warm at the curve of my shoulder, one fingertip drawing a slow line along my collarbone.
I lean into it without being told to.
