My Secret Lover Is His Brother novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Terms

Rainer Hallowell puts his terms in writing at midnight: a lock on her door, no touch, nothing in the debt buys her; a pebble hits her window and it is his brother in the garden.

They gave me a room at the end of the east hall with a canopy bed and a window over the sea wall.

It was bigger than my father's whole kitchen.

At midnight, a knock came, two taps, even as a clock.

I opened the door a hand's width.

Rainer Hallowell stood in the hall in his shirtsleeves with a single sheet of paper.

"May I come in?"

"No."

He nodded as though that were the answer he'd come for.

"Then would you come down to my study?"

"The door stays open. You choose the chair."

I followed him down the stairs with my boots still on.

His study smelled of cold coffee and lemon oil.

A great desk faced a wall of ledgers, each as tall as my forearm and bound in green cloth.

He gave me the chair by the door, the one nearest the hall, and took the one behind the desk without being asked to.

Then he slid the paper across.

It was typed, with a black fountain pen lying beside it.

"Read it before you say anything," he said.

I read it.

The first line said I would have a room with a lock, and only I would hold the key.

The second said no Hallowell would touch me unless I put my hand on him first.

The third said nothing in the note, the wharf or this arrangement bought my bed, my name or my silence.

The fourth said I could leave the Harbor House at any hour and he would drive me himself.

The fifth said that if I refused on the twentieth, he would stand on that dais and say so before the town.

I read the third line again.

"You wrote this before tonight," I said.

"I wrote it in my head on the dais, while our father was still talking."

He looked at the ledgers, not at me.

"I typed it after you left the ballroom."

"That fast?"

"It took four minutes. I've been drafting leases since I was nineteen."

Something almost like humor crossed his face and was gone.

I set the paper down.

"Why did you stand up first?"

"Because my father asked who would have you as if you were a lot at an auction," he said.

"And because I need a wife by the Centennial."

He said it quite flat.

"My father's will leaves the Trust to whichever of us is married that night."

"If my brother gets it, he'll sell the waterfront by spring to spite our father."

"The harbor would go to men who've never touched a rope."

"If I get it, I can close the dais."

"So I'd be a means to an end."

"You would be a woman I would not lie to."

I looked at him.

He kept his hands flat on the desk.

"You're offering a marriage on paper," I said.

"I'm offering a contract with a door in it. You can walk through any time."

"And your brother?"

I hadn't meant to ask it.

His steel eyes came up and met mine and did not move.

"I saw you in the cloakroom, Miss Pascoe."

"I don't know what you are to him, and I'm not asking."

"My brother is a grown man. You are a grown woman."

"What I'm putting on this table has nothing to do with what happens in a bed that isn't mine."

A coal of anger went through me, and under it, strangely, a loosening.

Nobody in that ballroom had asked what I wanted.

He was the first, and he had asked by leaving it blank.

"I keep a clean ledger," he said, almost to himself. "It's the only thing I'm good at."

I picked up the pen.

It was heavy and warm from his hand.

At the top of the page, the typed line said, Fiancée.

I drew a line through the word and wrote Guest above it.

I put my initials next to the change.

"Guest," I said. "Until the twentieth. Then I'll tell you which."

He read the correction upside down.

Then he nodded once.

"Guest," he said. "Agreed."

He signed under me with the same pen.

His handwriting was small, upright and unhurried, the writing of a man who had never had to hurry because he had never been late.

"Your father drove home alone," he said, and it wasn't a threat; it was information.

"The Trust's driver followed him as far as Mill Row."

"He's safe, and he'll stay that way until the twentieth, whatever else happens."

I stood.

"You can't promise that. Your father is your father."

"I can put my name under yours," Rainer said.

"I just did."

I went back up the stairs with the paper folded in my pocket.

I didn't know what I thought of him.

I knew he had not once looked at my mouth.

My room was cold, and I stood in the dark and listened to the sea wall hammering below the window.

Two doors down, the pipes ran.

Someone was awake in Tiernan's old room.

I put my hand against the wall without deciding to.

Something struck the glass, a small hard click, and then another.

I crossed to the window and pushed it up.

Down in the frozen garden, in a cream sweater and no coat, with a handful of gravel, Tiernan stood looking up at me.

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