Stand Aside, the Billionaire Is Here novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Terms

In her car Daphne lays out a one-year contract, he signs and refuses the money, and the board vote moves up to Saturday noon.

My driver held the back door of the black sedan, and Joaquin looked at it.

"You can sit in it," I said. "It's a car."

"I know what a car is."

He got in and left a full seat between us.

The door shut, the street noise dropped, and I realized I was shaking.

I had just proposed to a stranger in front of forty people, and one of them had been filming.

"Okay," I said, and took a folder from my bag.

"Here are the terms.

"One year, starting tomorrow.

"You live in my house in River Oaks.

"You come to the events I tell you to come to and you act like you adore me."

"How much acting?"

"Hand on my back, kiss on the cheek, a look across the room."

"I can do a look."

"I pay you fifty thousand dollars, and at the end we divorce quietly."

He took the folder from my hand and turned on the dome light.

I watched him read.

He read every page, and he read it slowly, and his lips moved a little on the long words.

I decided this was a man who had never been handed a contract he could afford to sign without reading.

"Page four," he said. "You get final say on where I sleep."

"The guest room."

"And I get final say on what I eat?"

"What?"

"Your cook. I bet she puts pepper on nothing."

I almost laughed, and I did not want to.

"I don't have a cook," I said. "I have a woman who delivers meals on Mondays."

"That's a crime," Joaquin said.

He kept reading.

At the bottom he stopped and tapped the line with the payment.

"Cross that out."

"The fifty thousand?"

"All of it."

I stared at him.

His jacket was frayed at the cuff and his watch was cheap steel.

He had just turned down fifty thousand dollars.

"Everyone has a price," I said.

"Sure. Mine's dinner."

"Dinner."

"Real dinner, at your house, not delivered. I'll cook it."

I did not know what to say to that.

"You can't be serious," I said. "You don't know me. I'm using you."

"You stood up in front of a room to do it," he said. "That counts for something."

His voice was gentle, and his dark eyes were on me, and I felt it low in my stomach.

I looked away first.

"Why do you want this?" I asked. "A woman you loved just humiliated you in public."

"This is how you want to spend your year?"

"I wasn't humiliated," Joaquin said.

"You were on your knees in a restaurant."

"I've been on my knees in worse places. I got up."

He said it so simply that it was not a boast.

He took a cheap blue pen from inside his jacket, clicked it, and signed every page where the flags were.

Then he handed me the folder.

"There," he said. "Husband."

His signature was neat, square and heavy.

"One more thing," I said, because I had to know. "Why me?"

"You asked."

"That's not an answer."

"It is." He looked at his hands. "Twelve years I've been waiting for somebody to ask me to stay."

He did not say anything else, and I did not push.

The sedan pulled onto Memorial Drive, and the lights of the Ship Channel cranes showed far off on the east.

My phone buzzed in my lap.

It was an email from Lionel, my uncle, the chairman of the board.

I read it twice.

Joaquin watched my face change.

"Bad?"

"My uncle moved the vote."

"To when?"

"Tomorrow." I swallowed. "Saturday at noon, at the tower."

I looked at the clock on the dash.

It was ten past nine at night.

"I have fifteen hours to be married," I said.

Joaquin leaned forward and spoke to my driver for the first time.

"Does a judge in this county work weekends?"

"My grandmother knows one," I said.

I was already dialing.

Adelaide Heyward picked up on the second ring.

"Daphne," she said. "You sound like you did something reckless."

"I need a judge by morning, Grandma."

"Whose name goes on the license?"

I looked at the man beside me.

I did not know his last name.

"Joaquin," I said, covering the phone. "Joaquin what?"

"Medrano," he said.

"Joaquin Medrano," I told my grandmother.

There was a long pause on the line.

"Medrano," Adelaide said, and I heard something in her voice that I could not read.

"Bring him to breakfast," she said. "Seven o'clock. I want to look at him."

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