QB! Look what you made me do! novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terms

Sorcha signs a year-long contract marriage at Cade's house, then takes Thurston's call: steal the black notebook from his study safe in sixty days or lose everything.

I woke up in a stranger's guest room with lace stuck to my ribs.

Sunlight came through tall windows, and a gray stone house hummed quietly around me.

It was Sunday, November eighth, and I was lying on a bed worth more than my car.

Marlo had sent nineteen texts.

The last one said, "Please be alive. I made muffins in a panic."

I typed back, "Alive. Long story. Don't open the door to anyone."

Then I sat up and looked at my hands.

They had stopped shaking sometime in the night.

That scared me more than the shaking.

A knock came at the door.

"Breakfast in ten minutes," Cade said through the wood. "The lawyer's already here."

The dress was ruined, so I wore the sweatshirt he had left folded on the chair.

It smelled like cedar and detergent and it hung to my knees.

The kitchen was white marble and steel, and a thin man in a gray suit sat at the island with a stack of paper.

Cade stood at the stove cracking eggs one-handed.

"Sorcha Delaney, meet the guy who'll read this out loud while you pretend to listen," he said.

The lawyer did not smile.

I sat and he slid the contract across the marble.

Twelve months starting Wednesday.

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, paid to me in monthly installments.

Separate bedrooms in the same house.

Public affection when anyone was watching.

No other partners while it ran.

Either of us could end it with thirty days' notice.

"I'm thirty-one," Cade said, plating the eggs. "I've been in more fights than meetings, so I wrote the rules short."

"You want a stranger in your house for a year," I said.

"I want a wife who looks like she belongs in it."

"And you think I'll sign?"

"You walked onto a stage in front of eight hundred people to say you'd married me."

He slid the plate toward me.

"You'll sign."

I hated that he was right.

I picked up the pen.

The eggs were perfect.

I ate every bite without looking at him.

At ten o'clock the front door banged and a cane tapped across the hall.

A small woman in a camel coat appeared in the kitchen doorway.

Her silver hair was cut in a sharp bob and her eyes went straight through me.

"So you're the bride," she said.

"This is my grandmother," Cade said. "Mavis Ward. She owns the club, the building, and my opinions."

"I own the club," Mavis said. "The opinions are his."

She looked at the sweatshirt, my bare feet and my red-rimmed eyes.

"Is she any good at lying?" she asked her grandson.

"She's terrible," Cade said.

"Good," Mavis said, and her mouth almost moved. "I hate good liars."

She turned to me.

"Don't hurt him, girl. He's all I've got, and he's very bad at being hurt."

My throat closed.

I managed, "Yes, ma'am."

When she left, the lawyer left with her, and the house went quiet.

Then my phone rang.

The screen said Unknown.

I knew who it was before I answered.

"Sorcha," said a soft, patient voice.

Thurston Cromwell never raised it, which made everything he said worse.

"That was lovely last night. Better than the script."

"I did what you asked," I said.

"You did more. Cade Ward has given you a ring and a roof."

My stomach turned over.

"There's a black notebook in his study safe, Sorcha. Leather, about this big."

"It belongs to me."

"I want it in sixty days."

"And if I don't get it?"

"Then the loan your father left is called in," Thurston said, kindly. "Four hundred and ten thousand dollars, Sorcha, all at once."

"And the McBrides' flower shop lease is mine too. I'd hate for your friend to find out how thin her mother's shop is on rent."

He hung up.

I stood with the phone in my fist until the screen went dark.

Marlo's mother had held me at my father's funeral.

I wasn't going to be the reason her door closed.

I walked down the hall without deciding to.

The study was the last door on the left, and it was open.

A heavy oak desk sat under a window.

A steel safe the size of a microwave sat in the wall behind it, and a framed photograph hung beside it.

I stepped closer.

It was a youth rugby team in a muddy field, twenty boys in red shirts squinting in the sun.

At the end of the back row stood a big man with a whistle around his neck and my father's crooked smile.

Beside him, one hand on his shoulder, stood a seventeen-year-old with a broken nose and a black eye.

Cade, with a scar through his eyebrow that hadn't healed yet.

Under the glass, in my father's handwriting, was a line I knew by heart.

"Ward. You're better than your worst day."

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