Marriage Offered, Love Declined novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ask
Olivia asks Sebastian for a $214,000 loan to save her father's house, he offers marriage instead, and she signs everything except the clause that says they will act in love.
I walked into a billionaire's office at 7:40 on a Monday morning and asked him for two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars.
I had a folder.
It held a spreadsheet, a copy of my father's note, and a repayment schedule I had written out by hand.
Sebastian Crewe did not look at the folder.
He looked at me, over the top of his wire glasses, from behind a desk the size of my father's kitchen.
"Sit down, Olivia."
I stayed standing.
"The house on Edgemont Street goes to the lender on Friday at five," I said. "Lyle Brockway has already told the neighbors."
"Cosima told me."
"Then you know why I'm here."
"I know why you think you're here."
I had known Sebastian for seven years.
He was my best friend's older brother, the one who left Thanksgiving early and said thank you to the cook.
He ran a company with nine hundred employees and he had never once smiled at me on purpose.
I put the folder on his desk and opened it for him.
"Four percent. Twelve years. I have the first payment in the account already."
"No."
He said it quietly.
My ears went hot.
"I'm good for it," I said. "I have never missed a payment on anything in my life."
"I believe you."
"Then why?"
"Because I don't lend money to people I'll see at Christmas."
I almost laughed.
I picked up the folder again, because my hands needed something to do.
"Fine. Thank you for your time."
"I'm not finished."
He took off his glasses and set them on the blotter.
Without them his eyes were a plain grey and much too direct.
"I'll give you the full amount on Friday morning. Not a loan. Nothing to pay back."
"Nobody does that."
"There's a condition."
There always is, I thought.
I had been waiting for it, in a way, since I'd stepped off the elevator.
"Say it."
"Marry me."
The office was so quiet I could hear the air vents.
"I need a wife by the twelfth of February," he said. "A real one, on paper, in the registry."
"Why February?"
"My father left a block of company shares in a trust. They come to me the day I marry."
"And?"
"My uncle wants to sell the company in February. Those shares decide the vote."
"You want a fake wife."
"I want a legal one. Until the first of March."
"There are agencies for that."
"My uncle runs the trust. He checks agencies. He doesn't know you, and my sister vouches for you."
"And I have a deadline."
"That's a cruel thing to say."
"It's an accurate thing to say."
I stared at him.
He looked back, perfectly calm, and I realized he had practiced this.
"Is this a joke?"
"I don't joke before nine."
He opened a drawer.
He took out six stapled pages and slid them across the desk.
They were already typed.
They already had my name on them.
"You had this drafted," I said.
"I drafted it myself on Saturday night. After Cosima told me about your father."
"Before I asked you for anything."
"Yes."
"So you were going to offer this no matter what I said."
"I was going to offer it if you came."
I sat down.
I didn't decide to. My knees did it for me.
My father never read the fine print on anything.
My mother read all of it, slowly, with a pencil, and so did I.
The marriage ended on the first of March.
The money paid straight to Brockway on signing, as a gift.
If I walked out before the vote, I would owe it back in pieces.
If I stayed through it, I owed nothing.
Clause 11 said that nothing in the contract was payment for anything personal.
It said either of us could refuse anything, at any time, and the money stayed paid.
I read that clause twice.
He watched me do it.
"Clause nine," I said.
"Go on."
"'In public, the parties will behave toward each other as a couple in love.'"
"The board will watch us. My uncle will watch us. It has to look like a marriage."
"It has to look like a marriage," I said. "It doesn't have to look like I'm in love with you."
"It's one sentence."
"It's the only sentence I won't do."
His mouth moved, barely.
"Why that one?"
"Because I'll wear your ring and I'll sit at your uncle's table," I said. "I won't act a feeling I'm being paid for."
"You're not being paid."
"Then it's even easier for me to say no."
My hand was shaking when I reached for the pen.
He saw it.
He put his own hand over mine, warm and dry, and held it flat on the paper until it stopped.
Neither of us said anything about that.
I signed page six.
I initialed every page before it.
Then, in the margin beside clause nine, in blue ink, I wrote: Declined. I will wear the ring. I will not act.
I pushed the pages back across the desk.
He read my note.
Then he picked up the pen, wrote under it, and turned the page around for me to see.
"Noted," it said. "Subject to amendment."
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