ONE YEAR, ONE HUSBAND
Book Three: The Kiss Before the Cameras
The Whitmore Charity Gala was, according to Ethan, the single most photographed event of the New York social calendar, which meant it was also the single most dangerous place for either of us to say the wrong thing.
"Smile like you mean it," he murmured, his hand resting at the small of my back as we crossed the marble lobby, flashbulbs going off in a rhythm I was starting to find almost soothing, the way white noise becomes background after enough exposure. "And whatever you do, do not mention Olivia."
"I wasn't planning to bring up your ex-girlfriend at a charity gala, Ethan. Give me some credit."
"You brought up my shirt-folding habits at a family dinner."
"That was different. That was true."
He didn't answer, but I caught the corner of his mouth tighten in that particular way that I had, against my better judgment, begun to think of as his almost-smile.
We had made it nearly two hours without incident, long enough that I'd started to relax, long enough that I'd let myself enjoy the champagne and the string quartet and the strange, floating unreality of standing beside Ethan Blake in a room full of the city's wealthiest people, playing a wife I was not.
Somewhere between the silent auction and the second course, I overheard something that had nothing to do with either of us, and everything to do with why I had come to this gala in the first place. Two men near the bar, one of whom I recognized from a magazine profile as the CEO of Hartwell Interiors, were discussing a supplier contract they needed to fill within the month, a contract, I realized with a small jolt, that Carter Design had bid on twice before and lost both times to larger firms with deeper pockets.
I didn't think. I simply walked over, introduced myself as Mia Carter of Carter Design, and spent the next four minutes describing, with more confidence than I felt, exactly why our custom joinery process could meet his timeline when the larger firms couldn't. He looked politely skeptical, the way powerful men look at ambitious strangers at parties, until Ethan appeared at my elbow.
"Hartwell," Ethan said, shaking the man's hand with the easy authority of someone who had clearly done business with him before. "If Carter Design says they can deliver, they can deliver. I've seen their work firsthand." He said it evenly, without a flicker, and continued smoothly. "I'd take the meeting, if I were you."
It was such a small thing, four sentences, delivered without fanfare, and yet I watched Hartwell's entire posture shift, watched the skepticism dissolve into genuine interest, and two days later Grace called me at nine in the morning, breathless, to tell me Hartwell Interiors had signed a preliminary agreement worth more than Carter Design had earned in the previous eight months combined.
"Did you know he was going to do that?" I asked Ethan that evening, still turning the contract over in my hands like it might vanish if I set it down.
"Do what?" he asked, not looking up from his laptop, though something in the studied neutrality of his voice told me he knew exactly what I meant.
"Vouch for us. To Hartwell."
"I said four sentences." He closed the laptop, finally meeting my eyes. "The work was already good enough to earn the rest."
"Ethan."
"You're welcome, Mia," he said, and went back to his screen before I could see whatever expression had crossed his face, though I thought, for just a moment, that it looked almost like he didn't want to be thanked for it at all, as if being caught in the act of kindness embarrassed him more than being caught in anything else.
✲ ✲ ✲
The reporter found us near the dessert table an hour later, a woman from the Post with her recorder already raised and a photographer trailing two steps behind her.
"Mrs. Blake," she said, "there's been a lot of speculation about how quickly this marriage happened. Can you tell our readers, in your own words, do you actually love your husband?"
The question landed like a dropped glass, sharp and sudden in a room built for softer things. I opened my mouth, and nothing came out, because I had rehearsed a dozen answers to a dozen easier questions and never once, not once, had Ethan or his publicist prepared me for this one asked so plainly, under lights this bright, with his hand still resting warm against my back.
I never got the chance to answer.
Ethan turned me toward him with two fingers under my chin, and before I understood what was happening, his mouth was on mine.
It was not a stage kiss. Or if it began as one, it did not stay one. His hand slid from my back to my waist, drawing me in, and for one disorienting, traitorous second I forgot the reporter, forgot the cameras, forgot the eight-page contract with my signature on it, and kissed him back like I meant it, because in that moment, God help me, I think I did.
The flashbulbs went off in a storm around us.
When he finally pulled back, his eyes were dark, his breath not quite even, and the reporter was beaming like she'd just been handed the front page for free.
"I believe that answers your question," Ethan said smoothly, his voice a full register calmer than his eyes, and steered me away by the elbow before she could ask a follow-up.
✲ ✲ ✲
"You could have warned me," I hissed, the moment we were alone in the back of the car, the privacy screen up, the city sliding past the windows in long smears of gold light.
"There wasn't time to warn you." He loosened his tie with two fingers, not looking at me. "It was the fastest way to end the question."
"You turned me into a prop."
"I turned us into a headline that isn't 'Blake Heir's Marriage Built on Debt,' which is the headline we would have gotten if you'd stood there stammering for six more seconds." His jaw was tight. "You're welcome."
"I don't need to be welcomed for being kissed without my consent, Ethan."
That landed. His head turned toward me, something sharp and immediate in his expression. "If you didn't want it, tell me now, and it will never happen again."
The car was very quiet.
I did not tell him that. I could not make myself tell him that, because the truth sat directly behind my teeth, hot and inconvenient, and the truth was that I had spent the entire drive home replaying the specific pressure of his hand at my waist, and I was furious at him for exactly one reason, which was that I had liked it far more than the terms of our contract allowed.
"Just tell me next time," I said instead, looking out the window.
"Understood," he said quietly, and if I hadn't been watching his reflection in the glass, I would have missed the way his shoulders dropped half an inch, like a man who had braced for a very different answer.
✲ ✲ ✲
I did not sleep that night. I lay in the dark replaying the kiss on a loop I couldn't shut off, cataloguing it against everything I thought I knew about him, the coldness the papers wrote about, the four quiet sentences that had just saved my father's company, the way his voice had gone rough saying my name in the car. None of it lined up the way it should have, and somewhere around two in the morning, out of sheer restless spite at my own inability to make sense of him, I decided the only reasonable response was retaliation.
The opportunity arrived the next afternoon, when a photographer from the same charity foundation showed up at the mansion to get a "candid" shot of the newlyweds for the foundation's annual report. Ethan, predictably, positioned us with the kind of careful, professional distance of two people posing for a business card photo, one hand at my waist, a foot of space between us, his expression arranged into something warm and utterly unconvincing to anyone who had spent two weeks learning the difference between his real smile and his photograph smile.
I closed the distance myself, rose up on my toes, and kissed him.
I felt him go rigid with surprise for exactly half a second before his hand came up to cradle my jaw, and the photographer's camera clicked away forgotten as the kiss stopped being retaliation and became something neither of us had planned for, slow and searching in a way that made my knees genuinely unreliable.
"That," he murmured against my mouth, when we finally broke apart, "felt significantly less like revenge than you intended."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," I said, my voice not nearly as steady as I wanted it to be, and walked away before he could see my face, though I heard him exhale something that might have been a laugh, or might have been considerably less steady than that.
✲ ✲ ✲
That evening, business dragged him into his study for a call, and I went looking for a book in the library, only to hear his voice through the half-open study door, low and clipped, clearly mid-conversation with someone.
"No, Noah, nothing has changed," he was saying. "It's a contract. I'm not confused about what this is."
I stopped in the hallway, my hand frozen on the doorframe.
"She's useful," he continued, and something in my chest went very cold and very still. "The board sees a stable marriage, Carter Design gets to survive, and in a year we both walk away with exactly what we came for. That was always the plan. I haven't lost sight of it, whatever it looked like at the gala."
There was a pause, and then, quieter, almost to himself, "I know how it looked, Noah. I was there."
I did not wait to hear the rest.
I walked back to my room on legs that felt borrowed from someone else, closed the door quietly, and sat down on the edge of the bed in the dark, my fingers still pressed to my mouth where I could have sworn, an hour earlier, I had felt something that mattered.
She's useful. Not my name. Not anything close to it. Just a term he might have used for a piece of equipment, or a line in a budget, spoken to the same cousin whose name I had heard whispered like a threat since the day I signed the contract.
I thought of the kiss in the ballroom, and the kiss by the photographer, and the particular way his hand had shaken, just slightly, against my jaw, and the four quiet sentences that had saved my father's company without a single word of thanks demanded in return, and I wondered, with a hollow, sinking certainty, exactly how much of it had been real, and how much of it I had simply wanted badly enough to invent.