Chapter 7: A Devil’s Bargain

The taxi ride home was the longest twenty minutes of my life.

I sat in the back seat with Rosa’s red dress riding up my thighs and my hands folded in my lap and the city sliding past the windows in streaks of gold and neon, and I did what I always did when something was too large to look at directly. I broke it into smaller pieces.

Piece one. A man had offered me more money than I had ever seen in one place in my entire life.

Piece two. That man was Damien Cole, whose name was carved into half the Manhattan skyline and whose eyes had dropped to the neckline of my dress for exactly one unguarded second before he had pulled himself back with the focused discipline of someone who did not permit himself many unguarded seconds and was annoyed that he had permitted that one.

Piece three. I had spent the entire dinner very carefully not thinking about that one second and had thought about almost nothing else.

I pressed my thighs together in the back of the cab and stared out the window and told myself firmly that I was a grown woman with real problems and a landlord with a thirty day notice and I needed to think practically.

My body had a completely different agenda.

Rosa was awake when I got home. She was sitting on my couch in my apartment because she had a key and absolutely no concept of boundaries when she was curious about something, and she looked up the moment I walked through the door with the expression of a woman who had been waiting for information and had run entirely out of patience.

“Tell me everything,” she said.

I dropped my bag on the chair by the door and reached behind me to unzip Rosa’s dress and stepped out of it carefully and draped it over the back of the chair in just my underwear because Rosa and I had long ago passed the point of modesty with each other, and walked to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water because my mouth had been dry since somewhere around the moment Damien Cole had smiled at me.

“He wants me to be his date,” I said. “For eight events over twelve weeks.”

Rosa stared at me. “His date.”

“His companion. His presence. Whatever word makes it sound less like what it sounds like.”

“And what does it sound like?”

I drank my water. “It sounds like a terrible idea that I cannot afford to turn down.”

I told her about Victoria. About the engagement and the brother and the charity auction and the way he had said I understood that too late and not late enough with his jaw tight and his eyes holding something painful and carefully contained. Rosa listened without interrupting, which was how I knew she understood this was serious.

“And the money?” she asked when I finished.

I told her the number.

Rosa put her face in her hands.

“Mia,” she said, her voice muffled behind her palms.

“I know.”

“That is not a number. That is a life change.”

“I know Rosa.”

She lifted her face. Her eyes were very serious now, the teasing entirely gone. “And what does he get from this besides someone to walk into rooms with?”

I was quiet for a moment. I thought about the charged air across that restaurant table. About his hand beside mine and the precise careful distance between them that had felt more intimate than touching. About the way he had looked at me like I was the only thing in that golden room worth looking at and had then very deliberately looked somewhere else.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that is the part I haven’t entirely figured out yet.”

Rosa left at midnight with strict instructions to call her the moment anything happened, which was Rosa’s way of acknowledging that something was going to happen without either of us having to say it plainly.

I lay in my bed in the dark and stared at the ceiling and tried to sleep.

Sleep did not come.

What came instead was the memory of his voice saying your name like a fact. The controlled discipline of a man pulling his gaze back from the neckline of a red dress. The ghost of a smile that had appeared once, briefly, like a light switched on in a room you didn’t know existed, and then carefully switched off again.

I pressed my hand flat against my stomach and breathed slowly and told myself to stop.

My body was not interested in stopping.

I thought about what it would mean to spend twelve weeks beside a man like that. Walking into rooms with him. Sitting close to him at dinner tables. Feeling the heat of him through expensive fabric and breathing whatever it was he smelled like which I had caught exactly once when he had stood to greet me and which had been clean and dark and warm in a way that had absolutely no right being as distracting as it was.

I shifted against my sheets.

Twelve weeks was a long time to be close to someone you were not allowed to want.

But the thirty day notice from my landlord was sitting at the bottom of my bag three feet away. My sketchbook full of paintings nobody wanted was on the kitchen table. My bank account had seventeen dollars in it and payday was Friday and after rent and utilities and the minimum payment on my credit card there would be eleven dollars left and the month still had three weeks to run.

I picked up my phone from the nightstand.

I opened a new message. I typed the number from his card. I stared at the blank message field for a long time.

Then I typed three words.

I’ll do it.

I put the phone face down on the nightstand and closed my eyes.

Thirty seconds later it buzzed.

I picked it up.

His reply was two words. Just two. But the way they sat on the screen of my phone in the dark of my bedroom did something to the base of my stomach that I felt all the way down to places I was not going to think about.

Good. Tomorrow.

I set the phone down.

Tomorrow.

I lay in the dark and pressed my thighs together and thought about a man in a dark suit with careful hands and eyes that held things he had not said yet. Thought about twelve weeks of standing close to someone whose gravity I could already feel from across a restaurant table. Thought about what happened when controlled people ran out of control.

I was still thinking about it when sleep finally pulled me under sometime past two in the morning.

I did not hear the notification come through at three am.

I did not see it until morning, when I reached for my phone with sleep still heavy in my eyes and found a message that made me sit up straight in my bed with my heart slamming against my ribs.

It was from an unknown number. Not Damien’s.

And it said some words that turned my blood cold.

Stay away from him. You have no idea.