Part of me thinks I’m projecting this on to Sebastian and being unfair, but a larger part of me knows that is how he truly sees himself. Making an appearance at Giorgio and Alessia’s reception will be his good deed for the week, and being a half-decent human to the wait staff is just the cherry on top.
Our car pulls up just as we reach the curb, and Sebastian opens the door, grabbing my hand to help me inside, and then gives one final nod towards the press pool—which has considerably diminished from the zoo it was when we arrived—before sliding in after me. As soon as the door shuts, his smile drops.
“Sorry to interrupt your good time.”
He’s staring straight ahead, and I mark it as the first time we’ve both been in the car when he hasn’t been staring at his phone, and he’s livid. Just my luck.
“I wouldn’t exactly call that a good time,” I say. “I was alone most of the night.”
I wasn’t going to bring it up. Sebastian isn’t my fiancé. We aren’t in love. But if he is going to leave me alone all night and then get angry with how I chose to spend my time, perhaps he should pay closer attention.
“You weren’t alone when I found you,” he says, turning to look down his nose at me. He looks severe in the overhead rope lighting in the limo, sharp shadows cutting across his cheekbones. “What did you tell Leon?”
“Is that what this is about? You think I told him about our arrangement?” I ask. “I just met the man under an hour ago. If you think I’d sell out your secret because one man batted his eyelashes at me, why would you offer me the deal at all? If you think so little of me, then—”
“I didn’t think little of you until I saw you with him,” he snaps. “I usually date women with taste.”
I turn to face him head-on to make sure my words can’t be misheard or confused. “We’re not dating.”
He rolls his brown eyes, though they look almost black in the dark limo. “You know what I mean.”
“No, I actually don’t,” I say, anger mixing with the alcohol into a questionable cocktail. “You’re allowed to sleep with whoever you want whenever you want, but if I so much as have a conversation with a man at a party you ditched me at, then I have to listen to you berate my taste in men and apologize?”
“Not ‘a man.’ Leon Knight. My biggest rival. You knew who he was, and yet—”
“No, I didn’t know who he was,” I interrupt. “But even if I had known, you barely spoke to me on the way to the event, and you left me as soon as we got through the doors. If you had strong feelings about who I should and should not hold a conversation with, you should have made that clear.”
“Fine. From this point on, don’t talk to Leon Knight anymore.”
“No.”
I cross my arms over my chest, cross one leg over the other, and sit tall in the seat. A month’s worth of frustration and confusion and doubts are pouring out of me. I wonder if Leon would be proud to know I’m finally speaking my mind.
“No?” Sebastian asks, lip curled back.
“No,” I repeat. “I’m not sure if you remember the details of our arrangement, Sebastian, but I’m doing you a favor, as well. I’m not some slave you can command around. I’m not going to spend the next two years or more of my life being your robot. I will speak with whomever I wish to speak with.”
I can practically feel the heat emanating from him. He clenches his fist at his side and grits his teeth.
When he speaks, the words come out muffled. “You are my devoted fiancée. And a devoted fiancée would be friends with my friends and would hate the people I hate.”
“Your brainwashed fiancée would do that,” I say. “Your self-sufficient fiancée makes up her own mind about people, and Leon Knight was nothing but kind to me tonight. He at least told me happy birthday.”
At this, Sebastian has the good sense to look ever so slightly guilty. “I didn’t know. It’s your job to remember those kinds of things for me, and—”
“I wrote it in your calendar.”
He fumbles for words and finally throws his hands up. “This is just a distraction. It’s not even important right now.”
I was annoyed when Sebastian didn’t pay attention to his calendar and didn’t know it was my birthday, but I’m livid now that he knows and still refuses to admit he made a mistake. He hasn’t even bothered to give me a measly “happy birthday.”
“It’s important to me.”
He groans. “I’ll buy you a birthday cake. A card, even. Then can we drop this?”
I shake my head, shocked at his inability to understand why I’m upset. I told Leon that Sebastian was a great schmoozer. He knows how to work a room and appeal to people, and yet, he’s completely incapable of grasping that I’m not a toddler throwing a temper tantrum who he can appease with a shiny toy. Clearly, he doesn’t know me at all.
“You’re upset because I talked to a man you hate,” I say quietly. “You’re angry because you think I’m failing at playing the part of your smitten fiancée. And yet, you can’t even manage to check the calendar I update for you every day in order to know it is my birthday.
“You sleep with other people even though we are engaged, which is fine, but only if I am allowed the same courtesy. Why should I put my life on hold for you if you don’t have to make any allowances for me? If you want me to be nothing more than a warm body to sign a legal document, fine. But don’t expect me to bow to your every whim when you barely make an effort to hold a conversation with me.”
Sebastian is quiet for a moment. At some point during my speech, he turned to look out the window, watching the city streets pass by. Slowly, he turns to me.
“I didn’t realize you would be so needy.”
I don’t know why I’m surprised, but his words almost knock the breath out of me. “Needy? I’m needy because I want the man I’m about to marry to pay me a small scrap of attention?”
He leans forward, face wrinkled into a snarl, his voice so low I can barely hear him. “We aren’t really getting married. It’s a business arrangement.”
“How are you going to fool your mother if you aren’t keeping up the charade yourself?” I ask, amazed that this man in charge of an entire company and thousands of employees could be so incredibly short-sighted. “How are we going to fool anyone if you don’t even try to pretend to like me?”
Sebastian puckers his lips and then turns to me, one eyebrow raised. “You’re in love with me, aren’t you? That’s what this is all about?”
I can’t help it, I laugh. “Are you kidding me?”
“I knew this would happen.” He shakes his head like my affection is some huge burden for him to bear. “I told you from the start that this was business only. I am not going to mix business and pleasure, Grace. Not to mention, you are my assistant. It would be strange.”
“Oh, yes. Sleeping with me while I’m your assistant who is pretending to be your fiancée who will soon enough be your wife would be strange,” I say, unable to hold in my hysterical laughter. “But you know what would also be strange? If I had any romantic interest in you at all.”
Sebastian’s eyes widen in surprise, and his lips press together. I wonder if he’s ever been rejected by a woman before.
“It would be strange because in order to fall in love with you, I would have to disregard all of my preferences for both personality and looks, not to mention throw away every ounce of self-respect I have,” I say, pausing to chuckle to myself. “And for you to think I could ever be in love with you is even stranger considering how poorly you treat me as both your assistant and your fiancée. I’ve been living with you for a month, and I’m still surprised when you say my name. For a while, I wasn’t even sure you knew what it was. So, you’re absolutely right. The entire situation would be totally strange.”
His face and neck are red when I finish, and he is trembling with barely suppressed rage.
“This whole arrangement is strange. It is a miracle anyone is even buying us as a couple,” he says, smiling
in a way that looks more like he is hissing. “I mean, what could a man like me possibly see in a woman like you? You couldn’t even find a job in your field after college, so you had to take a job as an assistant. How pathetic.”
Shame cuts through me like a knife, and I hate him for making me feel less than him. For making me feel unworthy when he is the selfish asshole who didn’t know it was my birthday. When he is the man who attended the party of a “friend” he hates. All the money in the world can’t turn him into a decent human being, and more than anything, I hate that I’m still surprised he could be so horrible.
The driver pulls up to a red light, and we are in the center lane of a three-lane road, but I gather my dress in one hand and open the door.
“Where are you going, Grace?” Sebastian asks, his anger replaced with surprise. He looks around at the cars around us like I might embarrass him in front of someone he knows. “Get back in the car.”
I step onto the pavement and close the door without another word. The light changes and the car doesn’t move—probably on Sebastian’s orders. The car behind us honks, and I wave an apology at the mustached man behind the wheel and cut through the traffic to the sidewalk. The car blares its horn twice more before Sebastian finally tells the car to go on without me.
I’m proud of myself. For standing up to him. For doing what I had to do to take care of myself. Until the car is out of sight and I’m alone on the street in an elegant, bright red dress on my birthday. I start walking with no destination in mind, but even my feet seem to know there is only one place in the world we can go.
Twenty minutes later, avoiding the giant wreath of orange leaves and fake skeleton bones that has been hanging there since Halloween, I knock on Myla’s door.
“Grace, baby,” she says like an old Hollywood starlet, throwing her arms wide. “Happy birthday! I didn’t think I’d see you tonight.”
Her bright red hair is straight and chopped around her chin, a few inches shorter than the last time I saw her, and she still has a full face of makeup on even though she’s wearing elephant-printed pajama shorts and an oversized T-shirt. Myla didn’t expect me to knock on her door, but she rarely expects anything that happens to her. She is always ready for adventure. Even on a Saturday night in, she does her hair and makeup just in case she gets a call about a concert or a party. It’s why I knew I could knock on her door and not disturb her. Myla likes surprises.
Though, once she takes a better look at me, her smile fades. “What happened, baby?”
I don’t know when I started crying. Or why, even. But I’m standing on Myla’s door in a red ball gown with tears and snot streaming down my face, and she doesn’t even blink. She pulls me through the door, wipes my face with a paper towel from the kitchen, and deposits me on her vintage sofa with a blanket and a box of tissues.
“Sweet or salty?” she calls from the kitchen.
I blow my nose and throw the tissue in the wastebasket under the coffee table. “Surprise me.”
A few minutes later, she walks in with a bowl of vanilla ice cream and a bag of potato chips. I watch as she grabs a handful of salt and vinegar potato chips and then crumbles them over the ice cream with the same precision I’ve seen people on baking shows frost wedding cakes. “You don’t have to choose. You can have both.”
I’m not sure why, but that sets me off again, and I pull three tissues from the box in rapid succession and sob into them. “I’m sorry. God, I’m a mess.”
“Girl,” Myla says, dropping down on the sofa next to me and wrapping her arm around my shoulders. “You don’t apologize for coming to see me when you’re down, do you hear me? That’s what I’m here for. Besides, I owe you one. Remember when Trenton broke up with me?”
“Trenton from Trenton, New Jersey?” I ask, chuckling through the sob.
“He moved there in high school, so his parents weren’t trying to make a joke, but yeah, him,” she says with a nod and a wave, wanting to get straight to the point. “I invaded your apartment for an entire week and made you call my boss and tell him I had appendicitis.”
“Your office sent you a ‘Get Well Soon’ bear that you let me keep.” I still have the bear somewhere in the back of my coat closet.
“Well, this is me paying you back for that. So,” she says, sliding over onto her own cushion and tucking her short legs underneath her body. “What did Sebastian do?”
Myla knows about Sebastian, but doesn’t know about our deal. She knows he is my boss and that we are engaged, and I know she doesn’t approve. She never has. Especially because Sebastian refuses to meet her or make any effort to get to know my life or my friends.
It’s not that I want to introduce Sebastian to everyone in my circle because I don’t. My parents don’t even know about the engagement, and I plan to keep it that way. They rarely make it up to the city to visit, anyway, so my plan was to visit the farm alone for the two years of our sham marriage, and then divorce Sebastian without ever mentioning it.
Lying to Myla would be more difficult, though. First of all, because I had to give up my apartment in Harlem. Sebastian said his mother would be suspicious if his fiancée kept her crappy studio apartment when he could afford to buy the entire building, so I subleased it to two college girls who were going to sleep in bunk beds and split the rent.
Second of all, because Myla can always tell when I’m lying. Always. Even when I told her about Sebastian, she knew something wasn’t right. I told her we’d been dating in secret and were getting engaged, and she just raised an eyebrow at me and shook her head. No matter how often I recited the story of how we got together, she never bought it. Not once.
Which is why she is barely surprised when I finally tell her the truth.
“You were going to marry him for money?” she asks.
I cover my face with my hands. The tears stopped by the time I got to the part of the story where Sebastian forgot my birthday. Myla called him an “impacted anal gland,” and I started laughing too hard to cry.
“I know. It’s embarrassing,” I say.
“Yeah, you should have gotten more than half a mill,” she says, nudging me. “The dude is a billionaire.”
I shake my head. “No, he isn’t. Not until he inherits the company.”
“Well, he’s closer to being a billionaire than either of us.”
“Okay, well, that’s true,” I concede.
“You should have bartered a bit.” She takes a bite of my barely touched ice cream and potato chip concoction, closing her eyes and nodding as she chews. Then she hands the bowl back to me and sighs. “The bright spot is that Leon seemed interested in you. Maybe you can for-real marry him, and then have even more money than Sebastian was offering. Boom. Lemons out of lemonade.”
I push a clump of solid ice cream around the lake of melted vanilla, watching as the soggy chip pieces get drowned in the liquid. “I don’t think he was interested in me. Not for me, anyway. He only cared because I’m engaged to Sebastian.”
“Were engaged to Sebastian,” Myla corrects.
I can’t even make eye contact with her.
“Grace!” She lunges across the couch and grabs my calf, tugging on it like it’s the last laptop during a Black Friday sale. “You are not still going to marry this douche, right?”
“It’s half a million dollars, Myla. That money could change my life.”
When Sebastian explained it over lunch, it sounded reasonable. I’d be giving up two years of my life for more money than I could hope to make in five. It would get me out of the hole. I could find a decent apartment, and find a job in my field that would allow me to pay for all of it once the money was gone. It was a miracle.
Except, suddenly two years seemed like a lifetime. It had only been a month, and here I was crying on Myla’s couch with a bowl of sugary, salty soup, mascara tracks down my cheeks. What would I look like after two years?
“Besides,” I continue, trying to convince myself more than Myla, “what if I end our arra
ngement and then lose my job? Not only will I not have the payout, but I also won’t have a paycheck. Sebastian could squash me like a bug and then pay some other woman to be his fake wife.”
Myla sighs like the answer is obvious. “And then you would sell your story to the press for a considerable sum of money and ruin his plan. Or, if you feel sleazy going to the press, you could go straight for the jugular.”
I give her a questioning look.
“Tell his mommy,” she says, wagging her brows. “Once again, you are failing to see how much power you have here, Grace. Sebastian revealed his plan to you, and now, for better or worse, you two are in this together. If he screws you out of your job, you can screw him right back.”
“Once again, you’re underestimating his power.” I adjust my dress around my legs, trying to tame the pouf so I don’t feel so much like a Chihuahua wearing a tutu. “Sebastian has massive influence in my industry. You remember how hard it was for me to find a job as a nobody?”
She nods.
“Think about how much harder it would be as the woman who agreed to fake-marry her boss? Or as the woman Sebastian Wayde blackballed all across the city.” I shake my head. “If I strike out at him, he’ll strike back twice as hard, and I don’t have the resources he does. I can’t afford to be on his bad side.”
Myla goes quiet, and I know it’s because she agrees with me. The only time Myla is quiet is when I’ve out-argued her.
Finally, she stretches her leg across the couch and kicks some of the tulle from my dress skirt with her toe.
“Do you want to borrow some clothes?”
I groan. “Yes, please.”
“And I assume you need a place to stay?” she asks, a sculpted eyebrow raised.
I press my palms together as though in prayer. “Bless you, Myla, you beautiful angel.”
She rolls her eyes, bobbing her head back and forth, her hair brushing against her sharp jawline. “I know, I know. You can stay as long as you’d like as long as you call me ‘Oh, Benevolent One.’”
We move to the bedroom to raid her closet. Myla gives me the choice between a fuzzy penguin onesie complete with orange flipper feet or a plain pink flannel set with black silk around the edges. She pouts when I choose the flannels.
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