Indecent Proposal (17 page)

“No lies between us?” he supplied.

She nodded and whispered, feeling more painfully vulnerable than she had all night, “No lies between us.”

“I married you because I am not my father. I may make his mistakes, but I am not my father.”

“Mistakes?” she asked, his words slipping down along her neck, through the skin down to her bones. Where it hurt.

Me
, she thought.
He means me
.

She thought of that girl nearly dead in a car crash and how she’d been pushed aside until she vanished.

“You wanted honesty,” he said.

“Yeah, that will teach me, won’t it?” She curled away from him, staring out the window at a world rushing by.

Chapter 13

Harrison bought his loft a few years ago in one of his early efforts to prove he wasn’t his parents. He used every scrap of his meager savings, collected over the years from his stipend as director of VetAid. He’d also used the trust his grandfather had set up in his name.

Just about everything he had except this loft had been eaten by the campaign. Until the election was over and he was back to earning a living in some capacity, he was as broke as he’d ever been. As he ever wanted to be.

The contract for his driver was paid for.

The jet belonged to his parents, and he was stupidly grateful for it.

The unit he bought was in an old cotton factory, part of the revitalization of unused urban spaces. It was in direct contrast to the home he grew up in on Clifton Road overlooking Druid Hills Golf Club in a leafy neighborhood off of Ponce de Leon Ave.

“You live in a factory?” Ryan stared up at the old brick building.

“Not what you expected?” he asked, leading her into the building.

He took no small amount of pleasure in surprising her. He was still sore from the way she’d slowly pulled him open inside the car, as if all his carefully kept secrets, all those things the Montgomerys hid away so well, were just readily available to her. As if she could
just reach into his chest and play tic-tac-toe with what hurt him the most.

He’d hurt her, too, in the car. It had seemed like the only way to get her to back off.

Another reason to stay removed from her. So they could come through this without tearing each other apart.

“You can use the second bedroom,” he said as they walked in, and he flipped on the lights. He pointed down the hall toward his guest room, which had a bed shoved into the corner surrounded by boxes and a treadmill he didn’t use enough. But it was clean and the sheets were fresh. “It’s a little cluttered, but it should work.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” she said, polite and subdued, which was kind of terrifying in her.

“There’s a bathroom right beside it,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

His entire floor plan was open concept, and he’d bought the furnished showroom with its modern furniture. The sleek leather sectional and the dining set next to the floor-to-ceiling windows faced a neon downtown.

A metal spiral staircase led up to his bedroom, bathroom, and a small study. The walls were brick and the metal beams across the ceiling were original, and he remembered once upon a time liking that. Liking how different it was from anything he grew up in. How independent it had made him feel.

His sister was halfway around the world saving lives and defying their parents by living in poverty, and he showed his rebellion by buying an industrial loft.

Sometimes he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

In the corner the kitchen was an eat-in counter, and he paid his assistant to grab groceries every week. Most of which piled up in his fridge until he threw them out,
but he was glad at the moment to have food he could offer the pale woman still standing at the door.

“Would you like a sandwich?”

Her face tightened. “No thanks.”

“You should eat something.” He hadn’t noticed it until now, but she looked much thinner than she had that night at the hotel. As if something had been slowly whittling her down to bone and muscle.

“Not unless you want me to throw up all over your floor.”

He paused while pulling ham out of his fridge. “Is that something you do a lot of?”

Hollow-eyed and exhausted, she looked at him, and he could tell that she was figuring out the distinction between no lies between them and keeping parts of herself safe.

He’d done the same thing in the car, figuring out just how much truth to give this stranger he’d married. It was cold. Calculating. And the only way to get through the next few weeks. To say nothing of the next two years.

Then it occurred to him that marrying her had been his biggest rebellion, and he didn’t know how he felt about that. He’d spent so many years putting distance between himself and his family, storing away parts of himself like he was hoarding it. But for what? For whom?

To be his own man. To distinguish himself from the long line of Montgomerys who’d squandered and abused every single advantage they’d had.

He’d spent so much time—every minute of every day since he’d been twenty-two—deciding who he wasn’t while still measuring himself with their yardstick. He envied his sister and her clean break from the family, but he could not get where he needed to go without them.

Simultaneously he cared about none of it and too much about all of it.

He felt sometimes that he’d spent so much time polishing all the wrong things about himself, leaving too much of real value to be forgotten, grown over with weeds and rust.

It is the job you’ve chosen
, he told himself.
It’s the role you play. You want to be in politics. All those things you don’t care about, or don’t want to care about—they matter
.

He looked at her, this fierce woman, perhaps liar, he’d married who seemed somehow so rooted in her flip-flops and shabby green dress, who despite all but selling herself to him managed to stand there defiant and totally her own person.

And he was envious of her. Envious of her singularity. Of the way she didn’t care about the yardsticks he cared about. He wanted to ask her how she did it.

“I’m going to bed.” She grabbed her purse and her beat-up duffel bag and walked down the hall toward his spare bedroom.

Harrison watched her go and then made a sandwich, which he ate standing up. The milk was still good, so he poured himself a glass and stood at his window, watched the headlights on I-75, and toasted his wedding night.

Alone.

Monday, August 26

Before dawn, Harrison woke up to the sound of someone being violently, wretchedly ill.

Ryan
.

All of it coming back to him in that confusing place between dream and reality.

He threw pants on and hustled down the metal steps to the bathroom next to the guest room.

Inside it was eerily silent. He knocked quietly on the door.

“Ryan?”

“Go away.”

“You sound … really sick.”

“I
am
really sick. Now go away.”

He stepped back from the door, feeling helpless, but then the door opened, revealing Ryan.

Dawn light, rosy and creamy, covered her pale, perfect skin. She wore short cotton shorts that revealed the muscled length of her legs and a thin, tight black tank top like the one from the night in the hotel.

“Hey,” he said, blindsided by the reality of her, sick and beautiful in his loft. “Everything … okay?”

“Fine.” She pushed past him toward the kitchen. The tattoo on her back peeked over the tank top’s black edge. The woman’s hands, wrapped in seaweed and flowers, her blond hair a cloud around her face. Her eyes closed in some kind of surrender.

She was drowning.

My wife has a tattoo of a drowning woman on her back
.

Ryan stopped, turned around, and went back to her room only to come out with a red teacup that he recognized from her apartment cradled in her hands.

As he watched, she got herself a glass of water and took a pill.

My pregnant wife
.

“I have teacups,” he said. “You didn’t need to bring your own.”

“I like my own.”

“Can I get you something?”

“I’m fine.” She sat at one of the high stools that in his memory no one had ever sat on. Ever.

His parents had barely been to his home. Wallace came once to watch a Braves game when his cable got blown out in a storm—which had been an oddly satisfying experience, despite the fact that he didn’t care much for baseball. He’d never had a party. The few women he’d dated hadn’t been over. If pressed, he would say that he would rather sleep on the couch in his campaign office than upstairs in the bedroom.

What does that say about me?

“What happened to no lies between us?” He stepped around her and into the kitchen to start coffee.

“I have bad morning sickness.” She gave him a wan smile before putting her head back in her hands. “I took a pill, but it just takes a while.”

He checked his watch. “Are you sure you’re up for this?” he asked, taking in her utterly defeated posture. “Because in a half hour most of my staff is going to be here to get us ready for the press conference.”

“You bought a wife.” She shook back her hair, her smile not quite up to full wattage, but he gave her points for trying. “You’ll get a wife.”

“We can postpone—”

She stood, uncoiling her body one long, lithe muscle at a time from his stool. “I’m going to take a shower.”

His team was good, his mother perhaps the best player of the political game in the world, but he had serious doubts that they were going to pull this off. She looked ill, the distance between them was vast and hurtful, and he felt oddly off center. Aware too clearly of the lies he’d been telling his whole life. Not big ones, not terrible ones like his father, but dozens of little ones, about his family. About happiness. And he wasn’t entirely sure of his own ability to carry off another series of lies.

And the pale, sick, and angry woman who was supposed
to help him tell those lies seemed completely incapable of looking him in the eyes, much less pretending to be in love.

This
, he thought,
is going to be a disaster
.

Wallace arrived full of ebullient congratulations in a hideous purple tie. Jill brought donuts and a marginally better outlook than yesterday. Dave, his assistant, silent and steadfast, made coffee.

“Where’s Ryan?” Wallace asked.

“Getting ready.” It was on the tip of his tongue to tell Wallace that this was never going to work. The press conference, the sham marriage—they should just quit while they were ahead.

But then Mother arrived with Noelle in tow, carrying armfuls of shopping bags. And he would not admit his misgivings in front of his mother.

“Where is she?” Patty asked, sniffing the air for Ryan. “I have her wardrobe.”

And as if the sound of her voice had been the starting bell in a boxing match, Ryan came out of the guest room, wearing a denim skirt and a faded blue Pabst Blue Ribbon beer tee shirt.

“She wore that just to piss off your mother, didn’t she?” Wallace whispered, biting into a second glazed donut. The remnants of his first were all over his tie.

Harrison didn’t answer, but he imagined that Ryan smiled when she’d put on that shirt, thinking about Patty’s reaction.

“Good morning,” Ryan said, looking oddly meek with her wet hair unbound, her face pink and freshly scrubbed.

It was weird. He’d seen her sad, horny, angry, scared, and worried. Never meek.

He put a hand against the small of her back, feeling through her shirt the tension of her muscles, the heat of her skin. “Let me introduce you to my team. You remember Wallace?”

“Of course.” She deliberately sidestepped his touch and he dropped his hand. The smile she gave Wallace was enviously genuine. “Nice tie.”

“Thanks,” Wallace said. “Nice shirt.”

She tugged on it, suddenly self-conscious, as he introduced her to everyone else.

“I want to thank you in advance,” she said, shaking hands with Jill and Dave. “For how much patience you’re going to need with me. I’m not familiar with any of this and I’m probably going to need more help than anyone knows, but I promise, I’m taking it seriously.”

“That’s … very good to hear,” Jill said, clearly still skeptical, but that was Jill’s natural state.

“Cool,” Dave added, unable to stop staring at Ryan, who even without makeup, the bright sunlight washing over her through the windows making her seem pale and fragile and thin, was shockingly beautiful.

When Ryan saw the shopping bags on the couch where Noelle had put them, her eyes lit up.

“For me?” she asked, and Noelle nodded.

Without another word, Ryan grabbed the bags against her chest and vanished back into the bedroom, without once looking at him.

“Well, that’s a good start,” Wallace said, looking over at Jill and Dave, who both nodded. Harrison had to admit she had a way about her that could be really disarming when she tried.

“A good start?” Patty scoffed as she settled into an armchair beside the television. “You honestly believe she can make a room full of journalists believe you’re in love. She’s acting like a kicked dog who won’t even look at you. She won’t let you touch her.”

“We’ll be fine.” He pushed aside his mother’s worries because they so mirrored his own. “Wallace? Let’s see your remarks.”

Dave handed out coffee to everyone and Wallace passed out copies of his remarks.

“No one will believe you met at an art gallery,” Mother said, crossing out a line.

“We need to decide how much truth we can tell and how far we can stretch a lie,” Wallace said.

“I can’t imagine she’s been in an art gallery in her life,” Patty said. “She looks like a woman begging for change outside—”

“How about we just say New York,” Harrison said.

“You can’t talk about any of her background,” Mother continued. “Or her family. No education, no—”

Ryan emerged from the bedroom, her heels a steady, strong click on the hardwood of the hallway. She came to stand in the wide doorway, an eye-searing vision in a scarlet suit that hugged her body, ending in a flared skirt at her knees. A pair of dark heels made the most of her already extraordinary legs. Everywhere Harrison looked—her hair in a tight bun, her lips stained with color, her eyelashes dark and sooty, the fit of her suit, the red covered buttons marching down her chest and narrow waist—everywhere he looked she was perfect.