Chapter 1: The Coat-Check Husband

Sienna Cole had eleven minutes to acquire a husband, and the coat-check line was not moving. \"Ticket number?\" the attendant asked the woman ahead of her, and Sienna wanted to scream that there was no ticket number in the world that mattered right now, that somewhere behind her in the gold-and-marble ballroom her stepmother was holding court under a banner that said THE DESMOND COLE MEMORIAL GALA in six-inch letters, and that in eleven minutes — ten, now — Vivian was going to find her and ask the question she'd been dreading for three weeks. Where's your husband, Sienna? There was no husband. There had never been a husband. There had been, this time last year, an actual, real, nice-enough boyfriend named Elliot who Sienna had let slip mention of at a board dinner, and Vivian — vulture-sharp, always listening for anything she could turn into leverage — had seized on it and never let go. Sienna hadn't corrected her fast enough. Then Elliot had moved to Denver, and Sienna had spent eleven months not correcting a lie that had, this week, curdled into an ultimatum. \"Bring him tonight,\" Vivian had said on the phone, sweet as poison, \"or I go to the board Monday and tell them your fifteen percent should go to someone who can actually be trusted with it. Someone stable. A wife. A husband. Anyone but a twenty-seven-year-old with no ring and no plan.\" The fifteen percent was the only thing Desmond Cole had left his daughter that Vivian couldn't touch. Not the house, not the cars, not the seat on the board that had gone to Vivian's mother the week after the funeral like a foregone conclusion — just fifteen percent of Halworth Textiles, voting shares, hers outright. It was small. It was also the only proof left in the world that her father had trusted her with something real, and Vivian wanted it gone. Sienna was not going to let that happen over a lie about a boyfriend who now lived in Colorado. So she was going to find a husband. In a coat-check line. In the next nine minutes. It was, she would think later, an insane plan even by the standards of a night that had already featured her drinking champagne in a supply closet to keep from crying in front of caterers. But panic did not consult sanity. Panic looked at the line of men shrugging out of overcoats and handing over tickets, waiting for their claim stubs, and it did math. Most of them were with dates. Two were clearly a couple, tender and matching in navy. One was seventy if he was a day, kind-faced, wearing a Halworth pin from thirty years of service — no. One had his phone out and was visibly, audibly closing a deal, snapping his fingers at the attendant like she owed him something — absolutely not. And then there was the man at the end of the line, alone, dark coat over one arm, not on his phone, not performing anything, just watching the room the way you watch weather — like it was information, not entertainment. Tall. Unhurried in a way that made everyone around him look frantic by comparison. He had the kind of face that photographed well by accident, sharp without being showy, and he was looking at the ballroom doors like a man calculating an exit route, which Sienna understood on a cellular level. She had six minutes. She walked straight up to him and grabbed his forearm. He looked down at her hand, then at her face, with an expression that was somehow both alarmed and amused, which she would come to learn was very much his resting state under pressure. \"I need you to be my husband for the next two hours,\" Sienna said. \"I will pay you. I don't know how much is appropriate for this, I've never done this before, but I have four hundred dollars in my bag and a credit card, and I need you to walk into that ballroom holding my hand and let one specific woman believe you married me, and then you never have to see me again.\" A beat. Two. \"That's a very fast pitch,\" he said. \"I have five minutes.\" \"Five minutes to convince a room of strangers you're married.\" \"Four and a half, now, because you're using them to interview me.\" Something moved behind his eyes — not confusion, not suspicion, something closer to interest, the particular interest of a man who had spent a very long time being bored in expensive rooms and had just been handed the single strangest thing anyone had said to him in years. \"What's her name? The specific woman.\" \"Vivian. My stepsister. Tall, blond, will be wearing something that costs more than your coat, and will ask you pointed personal questions designed to catch me in a lie.\" \"And what's the lie?\" \"That I have a husband.\" \"Right, I got that part. I mean what else. Job, how we met, how long, whether I know your middle name.\" Sienna stared at him. Nobody had ever, in the history of her scheming, asked follow-up questions this competent. \"You're taking this very seriously for a stranger in a coat line.\" \"I find," he said, and there was the faintest curl at the corner of his mouth now, \"that most nights like this are exactly as boring as they look. This is not boring.\" \"Is that a yes?\" He considered her for one more second — long enough that she felt it, actually felt the weight of being looked at by someone who was clearly, unmistakably deciding something — and then he held out his hand, not to shake hers, but to take it, like he already understood the assignment. \"Middle name's Marie,\" she said, gripping his hand back like a lifeline. \"After my mother. We met eight months ago. You don't work in textiles or anything even adjacent to my industry, or you'll get cornered into a conversation you can't fake. Say you're in — I don't know, real estate. It's vague and nobody ever wants to talk about it at parties.\" \"Real estate,\" he repeated, testing the word like it tasted strange in his mouth, which — though she didn't know it yet — it very much did, given that he owned four buildings on this block alone. \"Anything else?\" \"Don't tell me your name yet. If Vivian asks and I don't know how you introduce yourself, that's a tell. Introduce yourself to me first, in front of her, like we're being cute about it.\" \"You've thought about this.\" \"I've had six minutes and a lot of champagne.\" He laughed — actually laughed, a short surprised sound like it had escaped before he'd approved it — and something in Sienna's chest loosened half an inch, the first easing of the vice that had been closing on her ribs since Vivian's call that afternoon. \"Four minutes,\" he said, checking a watch that, had she known anything about watches, would have told her exactly who she'd grabbed. \"We should go be married.\" They left the coat-check line together, his hand warm and certain around hers, and Sienna Cole walked back into her father's memorial gala on the arm of a man whose name she did not know, about to lie to every person who mattered to her in the world, and felt — for the first time in three weeks — like she might actually survive the night. She had no idea that the man beside her had walked into this ballroom already owning eleven percent of the company throwing the party, or that within the hour her stepmother would look him dead in the eye and shake his hand without the faintest idea she was shaking the hand of the person quietly circling her family's company like a slow, patient tide. He, for his part, had no idea that the trembling, ferociously composed woman gripping his arm like a life raft was Desmond Cole's daughter — the fifteen percent he'd been told, by people who did his homework for him, barely mattered. It was about to matter enormously. But for now, there was only the ballroom ahead, glittering and enormous, a hundred and fifty of the city's wealthiest people under one roof, a stepmother in ice-blue silk turning at the sound of the doors, and a stranger's hand tightening, once, reassuringly, around Sienna's. \"Showtime,\" he murmured, close to her ear. \"What do I call you?\" \"Sienna,\" she said. \"What do I call you?\" He smiled at the crowd, at Vivian's approaching heels clicking sharp against marble, and said, low enough that only she could hear it, \"Nate. Call me Nate.\" Vivian arrived like weather, all momentum and perfume, and Sienna felt the entire architecture of the last five minutes tested in real time. \"There you are,\" Vivian said, eyes already sliding to the hand at Sienna's waist, cataloguing. \"I was starting to think you'd invented him.\" \"Invented is a strong word,\" Nate said, before Sienna could answer, extending his free hand with an ease that made her want to laugh out of sheer disbelieving relief. \"Though I understand the instinct. She talks about you like you're a hurricane with a seating chart.\" Something flickered in Vivian's expression — surprise, maybe, that the stranger had a sense of humor sharp enough to needle her back — and for one dizzying second Sienna thought the whole thing might actually, impossibly, work. \"Funny,\" Vivian said, recovering fast, professional smile sliding back into place. \"Well. Mother's been asking about you both. She likes to inspect anything new before it gets too comfortable in this family.\" \"We wouldn't dream of skipping the inspection,\" Nate said, and steered Sienna gently by the small of her back toward the heart of the ballroom, toward the woman in the black taffeta gown who ran Halworth's board with the same icy competence she'd used to raise Vivian, and Sienna felt her heart climb back up into her throat with every step. \"You don't have to keep doing the charming thing,\" she murmured, close to his ear, under the noise of the string quartet warming up near the dance floor. \"I already said yes to the deal. You can dial it back to merely adequate.\" \"I'm not doing a thing,\" he murmured back, and something about the honesty of it, dropped so casually into the middle of a lie this elaborate, made her look up at him too fast, caught off guard. The rest of the walk across the ballroom passed in a blur of chandelier light and clinking glass, Sienna acutely aware of every eye that tracked them, every whispered aside behind a raised champagne flute, and by the time they reached the board chair's small orbiting cluster of the city's most important people, Sienna's hand had found its way fully into Nate's, gripping hard enough that she was fairly sure she'd apologize for the bruise later, if there was a later, if any of this held. It was, she thought, the strangest ten minutes of her adult life, and it had not even properly started yet. The board chair turned at the sound of their approach, and Sienna watched the older woman's gaze move over Nate with the same clinical thoroughness Vivian had used — assessing the cut of his suit, the confidence of his posture, the small tells that separated old money from new money from no money at all pretending otherwise. Whatever she saw apparently passed muster, because her expression warmed by a professionally calibrated degree. "So this is the husband," she said, extending a ring-heavy hand. "Sienna's been remarkably private about you." "She likes to keep some things for herself," Nate said, shaking her hand with easy confidence. "I can't say I blame her, given how public everything else about tonight is." Something flickered behind the older woman's eyes — surprise, maybe, at being handled so smoothly by a stranger — and Sienna felt a fierce, unexpected pride at watching him hold his own against a woman who had spent decades making grown executives stammer. "Well," the board chair said, "I look forward to getting to know you properly. Perhaps at the next quarterly dinner." Her gaze flicked to Sienna, something almost like approval in it, rare enough that Sienna nearly didn't recognize the shape of it. "You've done well for yourself." It was, Sienna would realize much later, the first time in four years that woman had said anything to her that wasn't a correction or a dismissal, and it had taken an elaborate lie to earn it, which felt like exactly the kind of bitter irony her father would have found darkly funny.

Before you start reading

You must be 18 or older

Comments (0)