Chapter 11: The Cameras

I stopped on the top step with the doors still open behind me.

My legs were rubber from the sedation, and Jasper's arm was iron around my back.

Cameras swung toward me, and phones rose.

"Ms. Larkin," the reporter said again. "Is it true you invented a terminal diagnosis to get close to Jasper Holloway?"

"Where did you hear that?" I asked.

"A source with knowledge of the hospital."

"A source on the hospital's board, maybe?"

She didn't answer, and a man behind her checked his notes.

Jasper bent to my ear.

"We can go back inside. I'll handle it."

"No," I said. "It's my list."

I took a breath and looked straight into the lens.

"I had a biopsy twenty minutes ago," I said. "I'm waiting for the result like anyone else. Nobody has told me yet whether I'm dying."

The noise stopped.

"A resident told me I had about nine months, from a scan."

"I did not get a second opinion, because I was scared. That's the whole of my crime."

"And the engagement?" someone called.

"It started as an arrangement."

Jasper's hand tightened on my waist, and I didn't look at him.

"Mr. Holloway needed a fiancée for a board vote."

"I needed money for a list I wrote on the back of an appointment card. We signed a page."

"What was on the page?"

"He pays for my list, and the page says in his own hand that I'm not for sale."

My voice shook, and I let it.

"He has asked me for nothing. Not once. Every single thing that has happened between us, I chose, and I'd choose again."

"So the engagement is fake."

"The contract is fake," Jasper said.

I turned.

He had stepped in front of the cameras beside me, bareheaded, in the October wind.

"The deal was fake," he said. "I'm not."

A flash went off, and then twenty more.

"Mr. Holloway, are you saying you're in love with her?"

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