ONE YEAR, ONE HUSBAND
Book One: The Marriage Contract
Thirty days.
That number kept dancing in front of my eyes all morning, printed in bold on the last page of the will Mr. Harmon had just finished reading aloud. Not thirty days to mourn my father. Not thirty days to steady myself after watching his coffin lowered into the ground two weeks earlier. Thirty days to find a way to save Carter Design from falling into the hands of Uncle Victor, who sat across from me now wearing an expression of grief so manufactured I wanted to throw my tea in his face.
“You understand the terms, Mia?” Mr. Harmon took off his glasses, his voice as gentle as if he were delivering a second death notice. “If you are not legally married before your twenty-sixth birthday, exactly one month from today, full control of the company transfers to the guardian named in the will.”
“That guardian is Uncle Victor,” I said. It wasn't a question.
“We're only honoring your father's final wishes,” Victor cut in, his voice sweet as spoiled syrup. “Charles always wanted you to have a home, Mia. He worried you'd give your whole life to the company and forget yourself.”
I dug my nails into my palm hard enough to keep from saying what I actually thought. My father hadn't worried I'd be lonely. My father had worried I would hand the company straight to the very man sitting across from me now, the man I was beginning to suspect had a hand in the crushing debt hanging over Carter Design like an axe.
But I had no proof. I had thirty days, a dying company, and not a single man in sight I trusted enough to stand at an altar with.
Until five o'clock that evening, when my assistant, Grace, burst into my office with her eyes as wide as if she'd just spotted a unicorn wandering the halls.
“Ethan Blake is in the waiting room,” she said. “He wants to see you. Right now.”
I'd heard that name often enough to know I should be worried. Ethan Blake, heir to the Blake Corporation, the man the papers called “Manhattan's Ice Man” because there was exactly one recorded instance of him smiling in five years, and that was the moment he'd just closed a deal that bankrupted three competitors at once.
I hadn't scheduled a meeting with him. I had no reason for one of the most powerful men in the city to walk into the small, dusty office of a furniture company teetering on the edge of collapse.
And yet there he was, standing in the middle of my conference room like he owned the building, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a cup of coffee that was most certainly not brewed by Grace, since she would never have dared serve a guest like this in my chipped mug shaped like a cat.
“Miss Carter.” It wasn't a greeting so much as a statement. “I have an offer you'll want to hear.”
“I don't do business with Blake Corporation,” I said, though my heart was beating faster than I wanted to admit. There was something about his cold brown eyes that made a person feel dissected under a microscope.
“I'm not here to buy your company.” He set the coffee cup down, precise to the millimeter, as though afraid to mark my scarred wooden desk. “I'm here to propose marriage.”
I laughed. Actually laughed, the kind loud enough that Grace poked her head in to see what was going on.
“I'm sorry, I thought you just said—”
“Marriage,” he repeated, unfazed by my laughter. “For one year. A contract, terms, lawyers present to witness everything. I need a legal wife before the Blake board votes at the end of the month, or control of the corporation goes to my cousin. I'm told you need precisely the same thing.”
The smile died on my lips.
“Who told you that?”
“I have my sources.” He tilted his head, studying me the way a man appraises a piece of furniture. “Charles Carter and my father did business together, years ago. I know more about your circumstances than you'd think, Miss Carter.”
That sentence should have made me more wary. But in that moment, all I heard was an emergency exit swinging open before the thirty days closing around my throat.
“What are the terms?” I asked, my voice gone rough.
He pulled a prepared folder from inside his jacket, as if he'd known I would say yes before he'd even walked through the door.
“One year of living as husband and wife. We appear together at every public event, maintain the appearance of an ordinary married couple to the press and to both our families. Neither party may unilaterally break the contract; whoever does forfeits every benefit agreed upon.” He paused, his gaze sharp as a blade. “And the most important clause of all: we do not fall in love, Miss Carter. This is a transaction. If you let feelings get involved, we both stand to lose more than we gain.”
I looked at him, this tall man with black hair and a face carved from cold marble, sitting in my shabby office and discussing love as though it were a line item to be cut.
“Are you absolutely certain this isn't a joke?”
“I have never joked about money or power,” he said. “The only two things I respect.”
I should have refused. I knew I should have refused. But I looked out the window, saw the fading Carter Design sign outside, saw the faces of the forty employees who had stayed loyal to my father's company for twenty years, and I knew I would sign anything to keep it.
“Fine,” I said. “But I have conditions of my own.”
For the first time, something flickered in his eyes—not quite surprise, but close to it.
“I'm listening.”
✲ ✲ ✲
We signed the contract three days later, in the private law office of the Blake family, under cold yellow light and the watch of four lawyers whose hourly rate, I was certain, exceeded my monthly salary.
“Miss Carter, you understand that by signing here, you agree to every term, including clause seven?” Ethan's lawyer asked, sliding the thick folder toward me.
I had read clause seven at least ten times over the past three days until I knew it by heart. *Both parties agree that this marriage is purely contractual in nature. Any display of affection beyond what is required to maintain public appearances shall be considered a violation of the spirit of this agreement.*
“I understand,” I said, and signed my name beneath Ethan's, his handwriting sharp and decisive, exactly like the man himself.
When I looked up, he was watching me, not the way a new husband looks at his bride, but the way a man regards a merger he has just closed successfully.
“Welcome to the Blake family, Miss Carter,” he said.
“It's Mrs. Blake,” I corrected, not entirely sure why it irritated me that he insisted on keeping my old name. “If we're going to fool the entire world, you might as well get my name right.”
The corner of his mouth twitched upward, not quite a smile, just a faint curve that vanished almost as soon as it appeared.
“Fine. Mrs. Blake.”
I didn't understand why those two words made my stomach knot in such a strange way.
✲ ✲ ✲
The Blake mansion was larger than anywhere I had ever lived, a grey stone house on the Upper East Side with a spiral staircase I was fairly certain could kill me if I attempted it in heels on a rainy night. The housekeeper, Mrs. Whitfield, led me up to my bedroom, a vast room with a view of Central Park that probably cost more than my old apartment ever had, several times over.
“Mr. Blake's room is right next door, ma'am,” Mrs. Whitfield said, gesturing to an oak door barely ten feet from mine. “If you need anything, just knock.”
I forced a smile, trying not to dwell on the fact that I had just married a man whose bedroom sat closer to mine than my own parents' bedroom ever had to mine growing up.
That first evening, I tried to act normal by cooking a simple dinner, since I wasn't used to having staff hovering nearby, watching my every move. The result was a scorched pan of eggs, and in my panic to smother the small flame licking up from a dish towel I'd left too close to the stove, I accidentally grabbed Ethan's shirt, freshly removed and draped over a kitchen chair, a shirt whose fabric alone told me it cost more than half of Grace's monthly paycheck.
“What exactly are you doing?” Ethan's voice came from behind me just as the shirt caught a thin brown scorch mark along the sleeve.
I spun around, the smoking shirt still in my hand, my face surely redder than the flame I'd just put out.
“I'm... putting out a fire,” I said, my voice weak.
He looked at the scorched shirt in my hand, then at the blackened pan of eggs on the stove, then back at me, his expression the closest thing to bewilderment I had ever seen on this man's face.
“That's a Brioni.”
“It's a Brioni with a hole in it now,” I answered, fighting to keep my voice steady even as I wanted to sink through the floor. “I'll pay you back for it.”
“Don't bother.” He stepped closer, taking the shirt from my hand, his fingers brushing my wrist for a brief moment, just long enough to send an unreasonable shiver across my skin. “I have twenty more just like it.”
“Of course you do,” I muttered, and for the first time since meeting him, I thought I caught something very close to amusement flicker through his cold eyes.
✲ ✲ ✲
The real trouble came the following night, when I had to wear the black evening gown Grace had helped me pick for our official debut before the press as husband and wife. The zipper at the back of the dress caught fast right in the middle of my spine, exactly where I could not reach no matter how I twisted, and I was standing in the hallway, half in the dress and half losing my mind, when Ethan's door opened.
“Do you need help?” he asked, his eyes going straight to the stuck zipper.
“No,” I said, just as the zipper caught even harder when I tried to yank it myself. “Yes. Fine, yes.”
He stepped closer, and I turned my back to him, forcing myself to breathe evenly as I felt his fingers touch the fabric against my skin, carefully working the zipper free from where it had snagged in the thin lace.
“Don't move,” he said, his voice lower than I had ever heard it.
I stood still, but my heart did not. I could feel the warmth of his body only inches from mine, the scent of sandalwood and something distinctly his own weaving through every breath I took. His fingers brushed the length of my spine as he worked the last of the fabric free, and I had to bite my lip to keep from making a sound that would certainly have required a great deal of explaining from both of us.
“There,” he said, stepping back, his voice suddenly rougher than usual.
I turned to face him, and for one brief moment, just one, I saw something in his eyes that didn't match the image of the ice man I had read about in the papers for years.
Then it vanished, as quickly as it had come, and he was Ethan Blake again, cold and distant as ever.
“The car will be here in ten minutes,” he said, turning to walk away. “Don't keep me waiting, Mrs. Blake.”
I stood there, my heart still racing, wondering if I had just signed a contract, or walked into a trap I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to escape.
✲ ✲ ✲
That night, after our press debut went more smoothly than I'd dared hope, I returned to the mansion while Ethan stayed behind at the office to handle some urgent paperwork. I wandered down to the first-floor library, where Mrs. Whitfield had told me I could find something to read if sleep wouldn't come, and among the leather-bound shelves I stumbled upon an old filing cabinet labeled with a name I never expected to see in this house: **Carter Design – Loan Agreement 2019.**
My hand trembled as I opened the drawer and pulled out a thin, dust-covered folder. Inside was a copy of the loan agreement my father had signed five years earlier, the very debt whose weight had cost me countless sleepless nights.
And there, at the bottom of the page, beside my father's familiar, shaking signature, was another signature I recognized instantly, because I had seen it only three days ago, beneath my own marriage contract.
**Charles Blake.**
Ethan's father.
I stood there in the dark library of the house I had just called home, my hands clutching the folder, and the first feeling that rose in me wasn't fear.
It was a question I could not push away: How much did Ethan know about this, and why had he never said a single word?