Page 39 of Devotion
“Well,” Trisha said. “That was fun.”
Eleanor touched my arm. Her hand was gentle but her eyes were fierce. “The driver will take you to his house, sweetheart. Your things have already been moved.”
“Who was that?” I asked, though I was beginning to piece it together.
“Esmeralda,” Eleanor said. “Christopher’s stepmother.”
From what I’d just seen,stepmotherwas a generous term. The way she’d looked at Christopher and then at me, like we were obstacles she was already planning how to remove.
Christopher left without waiting for me. Trisha drove me to the house, the one I’d driven him to that night from the bar. It looked different in the daylight. Bigger, more permanent; a house that expected you to behave a certain way just by being inside it.
My things were already in the guest suite. My bag, my clothes, the framed photo of my parents, the folded quote. Everything I owned, which wasn’t much, arranged in a room that made it look even less.
I showered and changed into pajamas. Tried to sleep. Couldn’t.
I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Thought about the ring on my finger and everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
I heard the front door. Footsteps on dark wood. The muffled click of a door opening and closing deeper in the house.
He was home.
I got up and padded down the hallway in bare feet. The study light was on, spilling a thin line across the dark floor. I knocked twice.
“Come in.”
He was standing behind his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled, tie gone. His hair was ruffled and his eyes were bloodshot.
Had he been drinking?
The charming man from the gala was gone. The man who’d dropped to one knee and said beautiful things in front of three hundred people and whispered “just go with it” in my ear was nowhere in this room. This was another Christopher.
“We need to set some ground rules,” he said. No greeting. Nohow are you settling in. Just rules. Like I was a new employee and this was orientation.
“Okay,” I said.
“No entering my bedroom. Under any circumstances.”
“Okay.”
“No physical intimacy. What happened at the gala, the proposal, the cheek, that’s for public consumption. In this house, we’re business partners. Nothing more.”
“Understood.”
“My schedule is my own. I leave early, I come back late. Don’t wait up. Don’t ask where I’ve been.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Good.” He paused, setting his hands on the desk. “This is a transaction, Miley. Ninety days. After that, the sum transfers, and we go our separate ways. Clean. Simple.”
He said it all without looking at me. He was looking at the desk, the wall, the window—anywhere that wasn’t the woman standing in his study in pajamas who had just married him six hours ago.
I stood there and absorbed it. Every word. And somewhere underneath, my heart stung. Because for one stupid, irrational second on that stage, when he’d said he wanted to be himself because I saw the real him, some part of me had believed it.
That part needed toshut up.
“Ninety days,” I said. I kept my voice even. I even smiled. “That won’t be a problem, sir.”
I turned and walked out of the study.
