Terms

His text arrives while Romy is still paying for shoes she'll never wear.

Unknown: Gallery Mireau, East 64th. Side entrance. Six o'clock.

You tell Romy you're meeting a friend from Yale. She looks at you over the top of her sunglasses for a beat too long, then shrugs and air-kisses both your cheeks.

"Don't forget Thursday, Ava. Madame Vigneau. I'm not drinking that tea alone again."

"I won't forget."

You watch her get into a taxi, and you don't let your face move until it turns the corner.

At six exactly, a dark gray Range Rover pulls up to the side entrance of Gallery Mireau. Not a limousine. Not a driver in a cap. The window rolls down and Dominic Arkwright is behind the wheel himself, his suit jacket gone, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, one wrist draped over the steering wheel.

"Get in, Miss Wrenfield."

You get in.

The car smells like leather and cedar and him. He pulls into traffic without a word and drives two blocks west, then turns onto Fifth and finds a spot along the park wall where the streetlights are just coming on and the trees are still bare. He kills the engine.

Then he turns in his seat and looks at you.

In the enclosed space, he's overwhelming. The rolled sleeves show forearms corded with muscle and a dusting of copper hair. His collar is open at the throat. The green of his eyes is darker in the dusk, almost the color of deep water, and they move over your face with an attention so complete it feels like being touched.

"How did you know," he says.

Not a question. A demand, softened only by how quietly he says it.

"I told you."

"You told me I die on a bridge in June. That's not an explanation. That's a horror film." He doesn't look away. "Insider trading is an explanation. A source at Norrland. A lover on the board. Your stepmother setting me up to trade on it so she can call the SEC. Those are explanations."

"Did you trade on it?"

"No."

"Then she can't call anyone." You fold your hands in your lap to keep them still. "I don't have a source. I don't have a lover on anyone's board. I knew because my fiancé lost two hundred thousand dollars on Norrland stock this afternoon and screamed about it in my father's library, and I walked in on him."

His brow creases. "This afternoon, you were at a shoe store on Madison."

"Not this time. Last time."

He's very still.

"I died, Mr. Arkwright." You make yourself say it plainly. "On June 21, on my wedding night, at Wyndmere. And I woke up on Monday morning in my old bedroom, ninety days early, and everything is happening again exactly the way it happened before. Except me. I'm doing things differently."

A long silence. A cyclist goes by, his bell ringing faintly. The streetlights hum.

He doesn't laugh. You'd braced for laughter. Instead, he says, very evenly, "How did you die."

"Champagne." Your throat tightens. "My husband poured it. My stepsister held my hand."

Something flickers across his face, there and gone.

"And me," he says. "You said I was coming back to the house."

"You were at the wedding. You weren't invited. You came anyway." You look at his hands on the steering wheel, because you can't look at his eyes for this. "You found me on the terrace at the reception. You took my arm and said something to me. I laughed at you."

"What did I say."

"Don't drink anything he hands you, Miss Wrenfield."

The words sit in the car like a third person.

When you finally look up, he's staring out the windshield at the dark park, his jaw tight, that pale scar standing out along the bone.

"That's what I'd say," he says at last, so quietly you almost miss it. "That's exactly how I'd say it."

You let out a breath you didn't know you were holding.

"You don't have to believe me," you say. "You just have to marry me."

He turns back to you, and for the first time something that might be humor touches the corner of that hard, beautiful mouth.

"Terms, then," he says. "Yours first."

You had them written in your notebook. You don't need it.

"One year," you say. "Married on paper and in public. We go to things together, we're convincing, nobody can say it's a sham. After a year, we divorce quietly. You keep your board seats and my voting proxy for Wrenfield Holdings. You don't touch the trust's money. Only the votes."

"Agreed."

"Separate bedrooms."

"Agreed."

"And nothing physical," you say, and feel heat climb up your neck, "unless one of us asks, and the other one says yes. Out loud. Every time."

He looks at you for a moment longer than he needs to.

"That's not a term I'd have thought to need," he says. "But agreed. Every time." A beat. "That goes both ways, I assume."

"Both ways."

"Good. Mine." He holds up one finger. "You tell me the truth. All of it. Even the parts that make you sound insane. Especially those. If I'm going to marry a woman who says she's been dead, I'm not going to be the last one in the room to know something."

"Agreed."

He holds up a second finger. "Once you leave him, you live with me."

You stiffen. "That wasn't—"

"It isn't a term. It's a condition." His voice doesn't change, but something in it goes hard. "If what you've told me is true, there are people who were willing to kill you for your mother's money in June. The moment you walk away from Langholm, you stop being a bride they can use and start being a problem they have to solve. I'm not marrying a problem someone else solves on my watch. My building has security that the Secret Service would envy. Your stepmother's house has a housekeeper and a gardener."

He's right. You hate that he's right.

You realize you're shivering. It's March and the car's been off for ten minutes and your mother's camel coat is thinner than you remembered. He notices before you do.

"Can I?" He's already reaching into the back seat for his suit jacket, but he stops with it in his hand, and waits.

It takes you a second to understand he's asking. The term. Already.

"Yes," you say.

He leans across and settles the jacket over your shoulders. It's still warm from the car and it smells like him. For a moment his face is very close to yours, his knuckles just brushing the side of your neck as he straightens the collar, and you both go still.

Then he sits back.

"One more question," he says. "Not a term. I just want to know."

"Ask."

"You could have gone to anyone. Your family's lawyers. The police. Some prince in Monaco with a yacht and a terrible haircut." He studies you. "Why me, Ava?"

You pull his jacket tighter around you.

"Because three hundred people were at my wedding," you say. "My family. My friends. My fiancé. And you were the only one who tried."

He doesn't say anything at all.

The silence goes on long enough that you start to worry you've said too much. Then he starts the engine, and the dashboard lights up green across his face, and you see that his hands are not quite steady on the wheel.

"The engagement party," he says. "Saturday, at Wyndmere."

"How do you know about that?"

"I make a point of knowing where your stepmother will be." He pulls out into traffic. "Two hundred guests, every board member of Wrenfield Holdings, half the society pages. Everyone who needs to hear it, in one room."

You turn to stare at him. "You can't mean—"

"We announce it Saturday," Dominic says. "At your engagement party."