The Heiress' Return: No More Pretending novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terms

Ronan walks Gill through the clause and sets rules for their fake engagement, and at the gate a woman in a cleaner's jacket says she is Camille's mother.

I took the page from his hand and read it standing up.

The paper was old, cream-colored, with a bank's name pressed into the corner.

Clause seven was two lines long.

If the Hollister family ends or breaks the engagement, it will pay the Bellingham family two hundred million dollars.

"That's the whole trick?" I said. "They just pay?"

"They can't pay." Ronan folded his hands in his lap. "Your father borrowed against every hotel he owns to buy the last two. If he writes that check, there are no more Hollister hotels."

"Then I leave, and he loses everything."

"Then you leave, and he locks the gate before you reach it."

He said it flatly, without any heat.

"Not with chains. With kindness. Rooms, dresses, dinners, a mother who holds your wrist. You'd be the most loved prisoner in Los Angeles."

I thought of Adele squeezing my wrist in the car.

I put the page down on his desk.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I'd rather marry a woman who knows what she's holding than one who's been handed a ring and told she's lucky."

"You haven't asked if I want to marry you."

"No," he said. "I haven't."

He didn't smile when he said it, and he didn't look away either.

I had come in angry at him, too. He had agreed to marry a stranger without asking who she was.

I didn't say that part.

I looked at his hands instead.

They were big and square, with a white scar across one knuckle, and the veins stood out along his forearms where he had rolled his sleeves.

He caught me looking and let me.

It was the first time anyone in that house had looked back.

"Sit," he said. "Please."

I sat in the leather chair across the desk, and he rolled around it to be level with me.

When I stood again to move my chair back, I reached for the handles of his, out of habit.

"Don't," he said quietly.

I took my hand away.

"If you want to move me, you ask. I'll say yes more often than you'd think. But you ask."

"Fine."

"Good. Terms, then." He counted them off on his fingers. "In front of your family we're engaged. That's armor. It means nothing and it costs us nothing. Nobody touches anybody unless it helps."

"Agreed."

"And whatever they call you in that house, I won't call you what they do."

"What will they call me?"

"Country," he said. "Quietly, when they think you can't hear. Sweetheart, when you can."

"Nobody's said that."

"They will."

I let that sit.

Out on the terrace somebody had started a song, and two hundred people were singing it badly.

"What do I do?" I asked. "They want me to smile and stay quiet."

"Then smile and stay quiet." He rolled back a little to look at me properly. "Until the Foundation banquet. It's Saturday week. Three hundred people, every donor and reporter the family owns."

"And then?"

"Then you decide whether you want to be quiet in front of them."

I had spent six weeks being what everyone wanted.

It was strange to be asked what I wanted in a room with a man I'd known for ten minutes.

"What do you get out of it?"

"A front-row seat," Ronan said.

The door opened before I could ask what he meant.

Adele stood in the gap with her hand at her pearls, and her smile reached the room before the rest of her did.

"There you are, darling. You must be exhausted. I told Ronan to send you straight back to us."

"He did," I said.

"Wonderful." Her eyes moved to him and away. "Ronan, your driver is waiting with the car whenever you like."

She said it kindly, and there was a door in it somewhere.

Ronan only nodded.

I followed her down the hall, past the guests, past Camille laughing in a circle of girls in silver and gold.

She didn't look over.

An hour later I was alone on the gravel drive, in the dark, because the cottage over the garage they'd given me felt too small to breathe in.

The iron gate was lit by two lamps.

There was a woman standing outside it.

She wore a gray work jacket with a cleaning company's logo on the pocket, and her hands were wrapped around the bars.

She was thin, with gray roots in her hair, and she didn't look away when I came close.

"You're Gill," she said. "I've been outside this fence for three nights."

I stopped a few feet back.

"Who are you?"

"Maureen," she said. "I'm Camille's mother."

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