Clause Eleven

The contract was nineteen pages long, and clause eleven was the one that made Iris laugh out loud in the silent, glittering office.

"The party of the second part," she read aloud, "(that's me) shall not, under any circumstances, develop, express, or imply romantic affection toward the party of the first part." She looked up. "You put 'don't fall in love with me' in a legal document."

Lucian Hale did not look up from the window, where the city lay forty floors down like something he owned and didn't much like. "People honour what they sign," he said. "They forget what they promise."

He was, infuriatingly, exactly as the magazines drew him: tall, immaculate, handsome in the way of expensive things kept behind glass. The Frost Heir. Twenty-nine and already running half of Hale Group, with a reputation for warmth that ran from absolute zero to merely freezing.

And he needed a wife by month's end, or a clause in his grandfather's will handed his shares (and the war chest he'd been building for one specific purpose) to his cousin.

She needed eight hundred thousand to bury her father properly and undo what his debts had done to her mother.

It was a clean trade. One year. Separate rooms. Public affection on a schedule, like a dentist's appointment.

"I'll sign," Iris said, and picked up the pen. "But add a clause for me."

His gaze finally moved to her. "You're in no position to add clauses."

"Clause twenty," she said anyway, writing it in the margin in a neat, stubborn hand. "'The party of the first part shall not, under any circumstances, lie to the party of the second part.' If we're going to be strangers for a year, Mr. Hale, I'd at least like to be strangers who don't lie."

Something flickered across his face, there and gone, like a fish under ice. He crossed the room, took the pen from her fingers, and signed beneath her clause without a word.

It should have ended there. A transaction. She'd researched him for a week and learned exactly two things worth knowing: that the Hales had spent three generations at war with the Calloway dynasty over a betrayal no one alive could fully explain, and that Lucian had vowed, publicly and coldly, to finish that war in his lifetime.

What she hadn't told him (what she'd only learned a month ago, from a letter her father had hidden so well it took dying to reveal it) was the third thing.

Her mother's maiden name wasn't Mercer.

It was Calloway.

Iris signed her new name on the line. Iris Hale. The ink was still wet when Lucian's grandmother swept into the office, took one long look at Iris's face, and went very, very still, the way a person goes still when they've seen a ghost wearing someone else's clothes.

"My dear," the old woman said softly, "where did you say your mother was from?"

And Iris, who had just signed a contract promising not to fall in love, realised she'd forgotten to add a clause for herself: don't get caught.