The Arrangement novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Reading
Joss carries trays at a wake, hears a will demand a girlfriend, and offers to be one for a price. She kisses a stranger in a window while his uncle's man takes the photo.
The lawyer started reading the will, and I stood in the library doorway holding forty crab cakes.
I wasn't supposed to be there.
The caterer had sent me to collect the empty trays from the wake.
But the room had gone so quiet that I couldn't make my feet move.
The old man's family sat in a half circle of leather chairs.
His grandson sat apart from them, by the window, in a black sweater, with curls hanging into his eyes.
I had been told he was Caspar Kell and that he hadn't been seen at a family event in two years.
The trustee wore a green raincoat indoors and read from a single page.
"To my grandson Caspar, I leave the house at Gull Point and the controlling shares of Kell Harbor Lines."
Nobody moved.
"On one condition."
My phone buzzed against my hip.
I looked at it, because I'm an idiot.
It was the university bursar.
Your balance of $19,400 is due October 18 or your enrollment will lapse.
My stipend had died on Tuesday when my lab lost its grant.
I had four dollars in checking and a nine-dollar-an-hour tip pool.
"In the year after my death, Caspar shall bring to Gull Point, for four dinners, a woman he has been with the whole year."
The trustee turned the page.
"She must be his partner in fact. The trustee will judge. If he fails, house and shares pass to my nephew Clive."
A pink-faced man in a navy blazer let out a small, happy breath.
That was Clive Kell.
He had been shaking hands at the front door all afternoon.
He turned and saw me in the doorway.
His smile changed shape.
"Girl," he said, loud enough for the whole room. "This is a private reading."
"I'm getting the trays."
"Then get them and go. We don't need the help hearing family business."
A woman in a camel coat laughed behind her hand.
That was his daughter.
I put down the crab cakes on the nearest table, very slowly, and let him watch me do it.
"They're warm," I said. "Eat them before they stop being."
Caspar Kell had not laughed.
He stood up from the window seat, looked at the trustee, looked at his uncle, and walked out of the room through the opposite door.
He didn't say a word.
The trustee kept reading about the second dinner.
I followed him.
I'm not proud of that.
I'd like to say I did it from kindness, but my bursar balance was on my mind, and so was a man who had just lost a house in front of me and still hadn't been shown a plan.
The pantry was off the back hall.
He stood at the long marble counter with both hands flat on it and his head down.
His hands were shaking.
"Mr. Kell."
"Staff is through the kitchen." He didn't look up.
"I'm not here for the kitchen."
I shut the door behind me.
"Your uncle gets the house unless you bring a woman to four dinners."
"I heard it."
"You haven't got one."
He finally lifted his head.
His eyes were dark and tired, and there was a small white scar on his chin.
"That's the part I heard," he said.
"I'll do it."
He said nothing.
"A year," I said. "Four dinners. Whatever the trustee needs to see. I'll hold your hand and I'll laugh at your jokes."
"I don't have any jokes."
"I'll laugh anyway."
"Why?"
"Eighty thousand dollars."
He didn't blink.
I kept going, because if I stopped I'd hear how insane it was.
"I'm in a doctoral program that quit paying me on Tuesday. I owe nineteen thousand by the eighteenth. I'm not asking you to like me. I'm asking you to sign something."
He studied me for a long moment.
Then his eyes moved past my shoulder to the pantry window.
"That's not going to work," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because my uncle's already hired someone."
I turned around.
On the lawn, behind a hedge, a man in a gray jacket stood with a camera as long as my arm.
It was pointed at the pantry window.
"He's been following me since Wednesday," Caspar said. "If he photographs me alone in a pantry with a caterer, Clive says it's a staged hire. If he photographs me kissing one, he has to wonder."
My heart was going very fast.
"So we give him something."
"You're not required to."
"I know."
I stepped into the window light, took two fistfuls of his sweater, and kissed him.
He went completely still.
Then his hand came up and settled at the back of my neck, careful and warm, and his mouth opened under mine.
He tasted like cold coffee.
It was the best kiss I'd had in two years.
Out on the lawn, the long camera clicked.
I pulled away first.
Caspar looked at me with his hand still in my hair.
"Ninety," he said.
"What?"
"Make it ninety thousand. By Monday, they'll know everything about you."
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