A bunch of couples were clustered close together, kissing, touching, whispering . . . one couple, in particular, had me guesstimating how long it would be before the woman was spread out on the closest semi-private surface with her legs in the air. The guy didn’t seem as enthusiastic about the prospect, but she didn’t look like the kind of girl who heard no often. If ever.
I was half considering coming to Mr. Stiff Back’s rescue and mentioning something about his male lover running a few minutes late, but that was when I noticed, from the corner of my eye, someone’s arm lift.
I swallowed. It was him.
I gave myself one moment to prep for anything, so when I did look at him, nothing that hinted at surprise was present. If I acted surprised by the way he looked, then that led to the conclusion that I’d set expectations, and I didn’t have any.
No expectations. An exchange of vows. A million dollars. That was it. Nothing else. Nothing less. Certainly nothing more.
A business deal.
When I did look at the man with his arm extended, I felt nothing. No disappointment. No pleasant surprise. Nothing.
When my attention settled on him, he waved me over to the empty seat in front of him. He’d somehow wound up with the best spot in the whole room—a couple of deep-seated chairs positioned across from each other beneath a glowing chandelier.
As I passed Kate, she didn’t make it subtle that she was staring at the man I was moving toward. I didn’t have to check her face to know she was wearing some combination of a glare and a gape.
Even though I had no expectations, I knew Kate had arrived with some, and this guy definitely tipped toward the old end of the age scale. It was hard to say in this light, but he could have easily been my father, if not my grandfather.
I swallowed again. Okay, so he was old. So what? It wasn’t like I had to service his shriveled balls or anything. Marriage for money. Simple. If age wasn’t a factor for falling in love, then it definitely shouldn’t be for falling in fake love.
When I was a little way’s back, the man rose from the chair and painted on a conventional smile. It wasn’t warm. Nothing resembling friendly. It looked more forced than anything, like he was fighting every emotion to keep it there, which kind of baffled me. He was the one who’d set this whole marriage of mutual benefit into action.
Then it hit me—I was looking at the man I was going to marry.
I guessed the emotions dicing my gut into confetti were not the same feelings other women had when they looked at the guy they were about to exchange vows with.
“Miss Burton,” he said, motioning at the chair across from him.
“Mr. Sturm.” I made myself look into his eyes so he could see I wasn’t intimidated. I wasn’t some weak thing he could bend and twist to his liking. I needed him to know from the start that I might have accepted the position of his future bride, but I wasn’t giving up my identity in exchange. I wasn’t giving up the most microscopic sliver of it.
“Please, have a seat.” His gaze dropped to the chair I was positioned in front of.
I didn’t move. “You first.” I indicated the chair behind him and waited.
His brows came together, but after holding out for another minute, he took a seat. I stayed standing until he was fully situated.
“Would you like a drink?” His eyes darted to the bar.
I dropped into the chair slowly, reminding myself to think before I spoke. Every time I spoke. I didn’t want to start our relationship with him ordering me a drink. It was too much like a real relationship. Too traditional.
“No.” I shook my head and crossed my ankles. “Thank you.”
I could feel him looking at me, examining me. I wondered if he’d come into this arrangement with the same notions. No expectations. No room for disappointment. No margin of error for surprise.
I hoped so. I didn’t have a self-confidence issue, but I was also a realist. I knew I wasn’t the traditional Venus men wanted to take a piss on to mark their territory. I wasn’t a head-turner, the body a guy pictured as he jacked off. I wasn’t the first girl asked to dance . . . or the second or third.
Some might have said what I lacked in the looks department I made up for in the personality one. Society might have followed that up with a sympathetic pat on the back, but I took immense pride with my disposition.
Looks dimmed with time. Wit sharpened.
He leaned back into the chair, watching me like he was considering making a purchase. Hadn’t he already bought me? Hadn’t the price already been settled on? The longer his stare went on, the harder it became to not shift.
Like hell. I was not going to squirm in front of this man. I was not going to lead him to the assumption that I could be unsettled by something as small as a penetrating stare.
“Why are you doing this?”
I gave myself time to think before answering even though this answer was as basic as they came. “I need the money.”
No reason why. No explanation as to what had happened to shove me into this corner.
“As much as I need my green card?”
I didn’t look away. “Yes.”
He was quiet, contemplating my answer or scheming a way to get out of this now that I was sitting across from him. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but that was part of the beauty of this kind of arrangement. I didn’t need to know what he was thinking or try to guess or mold my next moves to whatever may have been on his mind. I had no reason to withhold honesty because I just didn’t give a shit what he thought about me.
And no, the irony of honesty being a perk of such a dishonest arrangement was not lost on me.
“And what happens if you suddenly decide to walk away from this?”
His voice held no hint of an accent, and he looked just as “American” as I did. Brown eyes, dark hair washing out to silver, average height and weight, a general apathetic tenor to his voice.
“That won’t happen,” I replied when I realized he was still waiting for my answer. American-looking or not, he was the one who wanted a green card badly enough to drop one million one dollar bills for it.
“How do you know?”
I was sitting across from the guy I was going to marry. I should feel something. I should feel some kind of emotion other than . . . resolve.
Damn. I really was as ice cold when it came to men as Kate had been telling me for years. Ever since Bryant Collins asked me to senior prom and my answer came in the form of a carton of milk spilling over his head.
I might have failed to mention to Kate that I’d overheard Bryant mentioning to a group of his friends that he was going to ask me so he could cross “popping a cherry” off his bucket list. You would have thought a guy with that lofty of a list would have been a bit more discreet with his virgin conquering plans.
So yeah. I’d been Ice Queen from that day on, and I’d fully embraced my title.
He was waiting for my answer. Again.
I needed to stop meandering down memory lane before he took his million somewhere else.
“Because I know exactly what it feels like to have people break their promises, and I will never do that to anyone.” I scooted a little toward the edge of my seat. “I won’t make a promise I can’t keep. And I expect the same from you.”
Maybe it was something in my voice. Maybe it was something on my face. Maybe it was a flatulence issue that had just been resolved, but he visibly relaxed. Almost like he’d just been read the negative results of a biopsy after waiting on edge for weeks.
“And you can promise to follow this through?” he asked, his gaze shifting just over my shoulder. It was faint, but I didn’t miss his nod. “To its end?”
I wanted to glance over my shoulder to see who he’d just signaled, but not before I answered him. I wanted to make sure I was always looking him in the eye when I answered. “I can promise you that.”
He nodded once more, but this time, it was aimed at me. “Then, Miss Burton, I’d like to introduce you to some
one.”
My eyebrows pulled together. Had he brought a friend to play lookout like I had? Shit, was he some undercover detective who’d baited me into this whole illegal affair? The guy now standing across from me definitely looked more like some hardened detective nearing retirement than some wealthy foreigner in the market for an American wife.
“You’d like to introduce me to who?”
That was when someone came up beside me. This was not the someone I’d expected. Not at all.
Shit again. I hadn’t had any expectations, remember?
The figure looming beside me exchanged places with the older man. Holy . . .
“Your future husband.”
Where was the abort button?
Not that I could punch it if it magically appeared in front of me anyway because my condition was, by banks’ standards, dire. All the overtime in the world couldn’t save me. Getting my body siliconed the hell out and grinding my ass up and down a pole couldn’t even save me. Nothing short of a windfall of money would save me, and I didn’t have the luck to win the lottery. As far as I knew, this was the only person making me that kind of an offer.
He hadn’t stopped smiling at me, and it wasn’t the friendly kind of smile. It was the kind that made it seem like he was in on some secret I wasn’t privy to. The kind of smile that made me feel like I was being trifled with and made the punch line of a hundred jokes I had yet to hear.
I wanted to wipe the cocky smile off his face, but that would have required touching him and even I wasn’t gutsy enough for that. A woman did not touch a guy like him unless she wanted him to be her undoing. Nope. You didn’t play with fire. You didn’t touch it. You didn’t even come close.
Fire. That was all I saw when I looked at him. I was playing with it by agreeing to this kind of arrangement with him. I’d rather have the grumpy-faced grandpa back.
Even the way he lounged in the chair was smug. Like it was his throne and he was just waiting for minions to come bow before him.
“You’re younger than I thought you’d be.” He broke the silence first.
Though it was faint, I could just make out an accent. It was European, but I couldn’t nail down the country. To look at the bastard, you’d think he was Scandinavian—blond hair, blue eyes, commanding frame—but his accent was too sharp to hail from the land of Vikings.
I was tempted to glare at the tipped smile aimed at me, but I didn’t want to lead him to the impression I cared. I gave him my version of the same smile, abandoning my “no expectations” policy for the prospect of pissing him off. “You’re older than I thought you’d be.”
His smile shifted into the realm of a smirk, like he knew I was lying. So yeah, maybe I was lying about thinking he was older, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of confirming his silent accusation. He was older than me, but not by much. He might have been closing in on thirty, but he wasn’t past it.
He leaned forward in the chair. When his gaze circled my face to my fiery red hair, his brow elevated. Yes, I am the stereotype. Be warned.
“Prettier too.”
I stiffened. He was fucking with me now. I’d already agreed to marry him. How much more did he think he could screw me over?
I gave him a cursory glance and kept the unaffected look on my face. “Uglier.”
He cocked a brow like he knew better. “And the personality of ten women rolled into one.”
“Intimidated?”
His head shook once. “Intrigued.”
“Irritated?”
His eyes investigated me again. It felt intrusive, definitely not cursory. “Impressed.”
“As impressed by me as the woman in heat who was just mauling you over by the bar?”
“You mean the woman who gave me this?” He pulled something out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and set it on the small table between us.
It was a hotel card key. With a lipstick kiss pressed into it.
“Classy place, this five-star hotel.” I glanced back at the woman at the bar. She was still there, watching him as though he was the height of the male species. “Did you tell her the reason you were here?”
His attention stayed on me. “Yes, I told her I was here to meet the woman I was going to marry.”
My stomach wrung. This was the man I was going to marry.
Holy shit.
“And she didn’t ask for her room key back?” I asked.
“She didn’t give it to me until right after I mentioned that.” His stare was intense. Too intense. I felt like every secret—every piece of who I was—was strewn out on that table for him to see. “Women love a man who isn’t afraid of commitment. It’s like an aphrodisiac.”
“You know what else women like?” I didn’t pause for an answer because I guessed he didn’t have a clue. “A man who’s humble.”
He fought a smile and leaned back in his chair when a server approached with a couple of drinks on a tray. “No, they like to think they do, but they don’t.” His head shook authoritatively. “They like the cocky bastard who goes after what he wants and doesn’t take no for an answer.”
Because the server was shielding some of me from his view, I allowed myself to shift. I was getting fired up, and if he kept saying the same kinds of things with the same kinds of looks on his face, that drink was going to wind up in his face.
That was when I noticed what the server had set in front of me. A tumbler with something amber in color. The same thing she was setting in front of him. Although from the curve of her smile, she was offering to give him a blow job on the side, compliments of the house.
“What is this?” I asked. Him. Her. Whoever wanted to answer.
“Scotch,” he answered, ignoring the server lingering between us.
My nose curled at the drink.
“Expensive scotch.”
“I don’t care if it came from the fountain of youth. I won’t drink it.”
His forehead creased with what appeared to be irritation, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was confusion, like he couldn’t decide what to make of me. “You would have me believe you wouldn’t take a sip of that if you knew it would give you eternal life?” When I shook my head, his head tipped. “Why?”
“Because I value my free will far more than long life.” I pushed the drink away until it clinked against his. “I’d rather live one day free than an eternity in a cage.”
He was quiet for a moment. The server stayed between us, staring at him, waiting.
“Then why are you here?” he asked me finally.
I leaned forward and hoped my stare was as powerful as his. “Because free will is expensive.”
He let that hang between us, never looking away. He wasn’t used to being challenged, having people push back. I understood why. He didn’t just exude confidence, he defined it. He didn’t just garner respect, he demanded it.
Of course one of the few men in the world who had probably been a world ruler in some other life would be about to marry one of the few women in the world who had likely been a Joan of Arc figure.
Irony? You suck.
“Well?” He waved between the server and me. “She’s not just lingering here for her health.”
I considered mentioning that no, she was waiting for him to take her up on the BJ offer, but better judgment caught me just in time. It was rare when that happened.
“Water,” I said to her, staring at him. I would not be intimated by a stare. I would not let him slate himself in the top spot by crumbling beneath his confident façade. “I’ll have a water please.”
“A water?” the server repeated, like she’d never heard of it. In this place, where inebriated seemed to be the theme, maybe she hadn’t.
“You know, that stuff that comes out of a faucet? All clear and cold? Chemical symbol H2O? That stuff we’re supposed to drink eight eight-ounce glasses of a day?” I paused when I noticed him fighting another smile. “That’s what I’d like. Please.” I might have been strong-minded, but I had m
anners.
Unlike the person sitting across from me, still fighting a smile that was dripping with amusement.
Once the server left to hopefully fill my drink order, I scanned the room. It was filling up. Kate and her friends were stationed at a table behind me. She was positioned so she could see us, but it wasn’t me she was watching. And she wasn’t appraising him like she was looking out for her friend’s best interest but like she was contemplating how to make him hers.
Of course I knew better because Kate and I held to the Girl Code that friends didn’t date each other’s boyfriends or, I guess in this case, future husbands. However, if I were someone else sitting across from this guy, she’d be making her play, probably in the form of her panties dropping in his lap. Kate didn’t do anything half-heartedly.
“You don’t have any problems with women.” I turned back around in my seat when I counted at least another dozen women making frequent, if not continuous, looks his way. “So why pay one a million dollars to marry you when I bet half of the women in this bar now would agree to marry you free of charge?”
When I looked at him, I found his stare still leveled on me. I wondered how he could keep that kind of concentration when half the room was giving him Take Me Now eyes
“Commitment is never free,” he answered, looking away for the first time. His gaze landed on the floor. “Believe me when I say a million dollars is a better deal. Twice as much would be a better deal.”
It was the first time I’d witnessed a shadow of emotion from him that didn’t tip the confidence scale. “Why?”
His eyes narrowed for a moment before they returned to mine. They were hardened almost. “Because attraction comes with complications, and I need this to be complication free. I need this to be a business transaction. You do something for me, and I pay you for it. No feelings. No emotions. Simple.”
The server returned with my water. It had ice and everything. I thanked her with a smile. She thanked him with a Fuck Me smile.
“You’re afraid of commitment,” I stated because it was one of the few truths I knew. Men, as a species, were afraid of commitment. Incapable of it. Humans as a species were incapable of it.