They Called Me Barren, I Married a Billionaire novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terms

In a penthouse with a gray cat, Elias's sister reads the contract aloud and Leona refuses the money and sets her own term; the video of the toast has four million views, and his grandmother wants dinner tonight.

By seven the next morning, the video of my signature had four million views.

I watched it once on the back seat of Elias's car and then turned the phone face down.

Mallory had called nine times, and Winston had texted twelve.

I deleted all twenty-one without reading them.

Elias's penthouse was on the forty-first floor, and the elevator opened straight into the living room.

It was all glass and black leather, with the whole gray lake outside.

A gray cat sat in the middle of the rug and looked at me without blinking.

"He doesn't like anyone," Elias said, hanging up his coat. "Don't take it personally."

"I'm not."

"He bit my lawyer."

I sat down on the sofa in the borrowed sweater his driver had brought me from a shop, and the cat walked across the rug.

He climbed onto my lap, turned around twice, and fell asleep.

Elias stood very still in the middle of the room.

"That has never happened," he said.

A woman in a charcoal pantsuit came out of the kitchen with a stack of paper and a pair of reading glasses on a chain.

"Oh good, it's the bride," she said. "I'm Imogen. I'm his sister. I'm also his lawyer this morning, because the real one is afraid of the cat."

"Leona," I said, and shook her hand with the arm the cat wasn't using.

"I know. I watched you sink a ring in my least favorite woman's champagne nine times on my phone." She sat across from me and slid the papers over. "I'm going to read you the important parts out loud, and he's going to stand there and say nothing."

"I'm sitting," Elias said.

"Then sit and say nothing."

He sat.

Imogen put her glasses on.

"Clause one. A marriage of one year, beginning Friday."

"Clause two. Separate bedrooms. You get the one with the lake view and the lock."

"Clause three. No sex, no feelings."

Elias looked at the window.

"Clause four." Imogen's voice dropped. "No children. Ever. He wrote that one himself, by hand, in the margin, in ink."

I looked at the line.

His handwriting was small and square, and the pen had gone through the paper on the last word.

"Why does it matter so much?" I asked him.

"It's a condition," he said. "Not a conversation."

Imogen made a small noise and turned the page.

"Clause five. Two million dollars at the end of the year, paid in a lump sum."

"No," I said.

Both of them looked at me.

"I don't want the money. I'm not being sold to anybody. If I'm doing this, I'm doing it for one thing."

"Which is?"

"Cordelia Stockbridge stands in that same ballroom," I said, "in front of the same people, and says out loud that she was wrong about me."

Elias leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

"That could take a year," he said.

"I have a year."

"What if she won't?"

"Then you've bought a very expensive coat rack," I said, "and I'll go on reading to second graders."

Imogen put a hand over her mouth, and her shoulders shook.

Elias didn't smile, but the scar through his left eyebrow moved.

"Put the money in the school's library fund, then," he said. "You can't stop me from that."

"The roof leaks over the picture books."

"Then the roof, too."

I looked at the cat asleep on my knees.

Yesterday morning I'd had a husband and a best friend and a kitchen where I knew where the spoons were.

"Write my clause in," I said. "Number six."

Imogen took out a pen and wrote it in the margin, and I watched her do it.

Her phone buzzed on the table.

She read the screen, and her face went through three expressions in a row.

"What?" Elias said.

"Nana saw the video."

"Which video?"

"All of them." Imogen turned the phone around. "Cordelia's toast, Leona's signature, the ring, you on the terrace in the background with your arms folded."

On the screen, in the corner of the clip, I could see him.

He had been watching me through the glass the entire time, and he had not looked away once.

"What did she say?" Elias asked.

Imogen cleared her throat.

"She said, 'Bring me the girl with the ring. Tonight. Dinner. Do not let her wear black.'"

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